


Into the Light

by choomchoom



Series: Into the Light [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Government Conspiracy, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Prison, Torture, canon-analogous character death, consensual doctor-patient romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-17 08:01:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 34,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13654845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: Someone really doesn't want the Lost Light to leave Cybertron. So when Metalhawk is killed, Rodimus is framed for his murder and set to be executed for ‘his’ crime.Drift refuses to let Rodimus’s execution happen. He had a vision of the future, and he will see it come true. For that future, he’ll sacrifice everything. Including, if it comes to it, his life.*Diverges from canon during MTMTE #1; borrows elements from the first season of the TV show Prison Break. Familiarity with Prison Break not required.*





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, friends, and welcome to Prison Break AU! Those of you who are familiar with Prison Break may recognize that Chapter 1 is heavily inspired by the pilot episode of Prison Break. I promise that the fic diverges from there! Other plot points are inspired by the show, but even if you know the show, I promise that there will be some unfamiliar twists and turns. I'll be updating the character tags and warnings as I go, so keep an eye on those.

“I didn’t do it, Drift. I didn’t!”

The prison visiting room was cold and dreary, with gray walls and low lighting. Drift sat on an uncomfortable stool off to one side of the room, facing the interior of the prison through a glass wall. Rodimus sat on the other side, frowning and sporting a black prisoner’s band across his chest, but still animated. Since Rodimus had been convicted of murder, he wasn’t allowed to come out and sit at one of the metal tables in the room Drift was in. Drift could only talk to him through the glass.

“I don’t want to believe you did,” Drift said, leaning forward to the point where he could almost rest his forehead on the glass. “But the evidence—”

“It’s all faked,” Rodimus said. “I didn’t kill him. Why would I? We were so close to leaving the planet. I’m only in here because someone didn’t want the Lost Light to launch.”

“Promise?” Drift’s voice came out choked. A lot rode on Rodimus’s answer. Drift had ideas for what he might do if the situation didn’t change. One idea, really. One far-fetched idea for how he might— _might_ —be able to get the Lost Light in the sky with himself and Rodimus on board.

“I swear on the ashes of Nyon. I didn’t kill Metalhawk.”

Drift shuttered his optics for a moment. He realized that he’d already known what Rodimus would say. He’d known it from Rodimus’s aura, from his optics, and from the things Rodimus had said—he’d had no reason to do what he was said to have done.

Drift opened his optics to meet Rodimus’s. “Thank you,” he whispered

The plan was on.

\--

Drift sat perfectly still as Syd applied the final touches to the last of the markings on his plating. He’d seen a lot of Syd over the past few weeks, and he liked her; she was friendly, but didn’t ask the kinds of questions that Drift didn’t want to answer. In the hours he’d spent sitting still as she carefully traced patterns in his plating with a thin marker and blowtorch, he’d learned a lot about her and her homeworld. About how she and her three amica endurae had traveled the galaxy for the last few thousand years as artists and traders. She never asked Drift about his own life—Drift suspected that the neutrals weren’t all too interested in hearing the answer to that kind of question from anyone wearing a badge. But more importantly, she never asked why he had come to her with very specific drawings of slightly altered religious symbols, why he wanted so many of them and in a certain pattern on his body, or why he needed the designs rendered so precisely.

“That’s it, then,” Syd said, leaning back. “You’re sure I can’t take a picture for my portfolio?” Her eyes raked over the tattoos longingly.

They were a work of art. That was undoubtable. But their purpose wasn’t to be pretty. Drift didn’t answer Syd about her portfolio. He’d set the no-pictures rule at the beginning. Instead, Drift handed her a currency card so that she could take the last of his payments.

“Wear them well,” Syd said as she handed his card back, her voice wistful.

Drift smiled, but he suspected that it didn’t reach his optics. “I plan to.”

“Be safe,” Syd said as he walked out the door.

Drift was gone too quickly to reply, but he let one corner of his mouth turn up in a grim smile. Safety wasn’t going to be abundant where he was going.

Drift ducked under a curtain that served as a door to a defunct shuttle that he had rented from some of the returned—probably drug traders or something else unsavory, judging by how little they’d asked for and their immediate understanding when he’d requested complete privacy. He flipped on the interior light.

There were just three more steps. One innocuous, one dreaded, and the last that would bind him to this course. Hopefully Syd’s ink wouldn’t smudge.

Step one. Drift grabbed a datastick off of the console and plugged it into the ship’s computer’s port. The datastick, which he’d kept in plain sight since he’d bought at the marketplace several days before, contained a virus that he had been promised would be able to wipe every bit of data on the ship.

The virus worked quickly, and better than Drift had expected. The ship’s dashboard sparked and not only the digital interface, but all of the lights on board went out. All his research, and the blueprints that Syd’s tattoos were based on, gone forever.

Cybertron’s sun was starting to set, but once his optics adjusted, Drift had enough light to see by. Just enough to complete his second task.

The flash drive he’d kept atop the console since he’d acquired it, but not so for the circuit booster. He had kept it in the cockpit’s tiny storage compartment, carefully wrapped in its original packaging. Now, Drift sat on the battered copilot’s seat and opened the storage compartment slowly. He grasped the booster between two fingers. And then he stared at it.

This was the point of no return. The last step would be easy. But this was the part that would determine if he was willing to truly sell his soul to this. His body, sure. Hours of time over the past weeks, sure. Significant portions of his money, no problem.

But this…this was bringing himself back to a place he swore he would never go. He looked at the full booster and thought about gold-tinged ancient memories of the time he’d then considered to be the darkest of his long life. He’d tried to come up with a way around this. He’d thought about it for weeks. But there was no other way.

The booster seemed practically alive in his hand. A part of him, small and weak but not gone, even after all this time, wanted it. A larger part of him was terrified of it. He supposed it was an appropriate reaction to the thing that had caused the sweetest pleasure and the most vicious pain of his life. He thought about the situation he was walking into. He thought of the dark future that would ensue if he didn’t commit to this. He thought of the brilliant future that might— _might_ —ensue if he did.

Drift made his peace. Inclining his head and shuttering his optics—he could do this with none of his senses at all—he injected the needle into a line in his wrist. He pushed down the plunger and watched imaginary stars explode in the darkness.

\--

The marketplace was an impressive conglomeration of tables full of foodstuffs, art, fabrics, trinkets and collectibles, religious paraphernalia, drugs of various shades of legality—not to say that half the “laws” on Cybertron were being enforced these days—and roughly anything else one could imagine.

Drift walked slowly toward his target. The central aisle of the marketplace had been taken over by a group of bots that sold religious and ancient Cybertronian literature. Some of their wares were truly rare, some even one of a kind in the whole galaxy. Their table was the place where Drift’s plan would incite maximum fear.

He was still wrapped in the golden haze of the circuit booster. He’d been afraid that taking one would interfere with his ability to think clearly, that he would go out of his mind with the pleasure of it after so long without. But instead, the booster seemed to sharpen his thoughts and augment his will. It was his companion for the final stage.

Well, the final stage that was entirely at his discretion. After this, things would just get more difficult to control.

When he reached the correct section of the marketplace, the section that he had staked out for weeks before choosing it for sure, he barely paused before drawing his blaster. The decision had already been made. Too much was already in motion for him to give up now. The crystal cold of the circuit booster running through his lines was evidence enough of that.

It also helped him steel his nerves to fire his blaster into the sky as he stood in the crowd around the bookseller’s.

Bots scrambled out of his way as if in a hivemind, leaving him alone in front of the booth. He leveled his blaster at the minibot at the table. His name was Casper, Drift knew, from weeks of watching him. He had a conjunx who also worked here.

Drift didn’t shoot at him. “Give me all of your currency cards,” he demanded. “Everything you have.”

When Casper hesitated, Drift took another step toward him and fired the blaster at an angle over Casper’s shoulder. The shot bounced off the ship behind him. “That was your warning,” Drift said.

He stood for what felt like minutes as Casper scrambled to push currency cards across the table toward him. Drift demanded a bag, pointing the blaster towards the bot again for show. Casper was stuffing the cards into a cloth sack when finally, finally, the police showed up.

“Drop the blaster, get on the ground, and put your hands on your head,” a helicopter announced from the sky as cop cars and ambulances and fire trucks surrounded him. “Immediately, or we will shoot.”

Drift didn’t doubt it. Since all of this would be for nothing if he died today, he slowly lowered himself to his knees, lowered his blaster to the ground, and extended his empty hands into the air.

Cars transformed and ran forward, one grabbing each of his wrists as they collectively forced him to the ground. Drift let it happen. The last thing he thought, before one of the cops jammed a fist into his neural cluster, was that Syd’s ink had better not smudge.

\--

The first thing Drift did when the handcuffs were taken off was check on the tattoos. No chips, no smudges. His shoulders sank in relief.

“You’ve got to have the strangest idea of postwar life of anyone I know.” The medic’s voice was gruff.

Drift looked up and his optics widened. Ratchet was doing prison medicine? He supposed the Autobots were short medics these days, but Drift had expected to be seeing literally anyone else.

He’d brainstormed ideas for how to deal with _literally anyone else_.

Luckily, Ratchet didn’t seem to care if Drift participated in the conversation at present. “Jazz wants to pair up with a fish and sing in a bar, fine. Bumblebee wants to play peacekeeper, fine. Ironhide wants to stand around and offer cryptic advice to anyone who dares step within fifty feet, fine. But you.” Ratchet pointed at the center of Drift’s chest. “You get body art the likes of which I’ve never seen on an Autobot, convert to a religion that no one has ever heard of, and then get yourself arrested for shooting up the marketplace while high on circuit boosters? Sit down.”

Drift did. “I—”

Ratchet got out a bag of medical tools and started laying them out on a table. “I’m not finished. Was this what you dreamed of during the war? When you were lying on a battlefield half-dead from laser fire—for that matter, three months ago, when you somehow managed to hold onto life after stabbing yourself in the _spark_ —was this the thought that kept you going? ‘I’m going to be a prisoner at the first non-POW detention center on Cybertron since Simanzi.’ That’s your happily ever after?”

Drift remained silent, confident that Ratchet wasn’t actually interested in the answer to his questions. Instead of continuing his tirade, though, Ratchet just sighed and shifted his attention to the datapad in front of him. “Medical history. I’ve got everything through your stunt at Vector Sigma, so I just need to add in anything recent. Any injuries?”

Drift shook his head.

“How long since you started using circuit boosters again?”

Drift froze at the again. Ratchet’s optics were boring straight ahead into his. They had never talked about their first meeting four million years ago, not in all the time they had known each other as Autobots. Come to think of it, they had barely talked at all. It was possible that Drift had been avoiding Ratchet. Unfortunately that solution wasn’t an option now—Drift needed something from him if his (hopefully short) prison stay was going to be worth anything.

Drift broke the stare, but not because he was uncomfortable. He used the opportunity to observe the large hatch labeled ‘emergency evacuation’ in one corner—exactly where it was supposed to be. The dunes outside were visible through a small window. Drift suspected that from a different angle, one could see the lights of New Iacon, just a few miles across the desert.

Drift turned back to Ratchet, and the problem at hand. He did his best to sound ashamed when he responded. It wasn’t hard. “Since I was released from the hospital, after Vector Sigma.”

For an instant, Ratchet looked like he was going to say something to that, but he just shook his head. “Give me your arm.”

Drift extended his left arm, and Ratchet plugged a device into his wrist port—a device that Drift had only seen before in pictures.

“How are the withdrawal symptoms?” Ratchet asked, frowning at the datapad attached to the machine.

“Manageable. Headaches, my hands shake, and I feel cold all the time even though my temperature readouts are normal, and I can’t recharge unless I’m really exhausted,” Drift replied honestly. He knew that the device—a NAIL invention that was part of a package for Cybertronians managing addictions—would be saying the same.

Ratchet scribbled something on his datapad. “Early stage,” he diagnosed. “That’ll get worse before it gets better.”

Drift waited, frozen, for what Ratchet might say next. If he didn’t recommend the treatment that went with the device, the whole plan was off.

“The neutral who invented this device also created a serum that mitigates withdrawal symptoms without maintaining the addiction,” Ratchet said, and Drift could have hugged him. “You’re welcome to refuse, but we both know that you’ll end up in my Medibay with crippling pain and a risk of spark burnout after a few days if you do. What do you say?”

“Does this…medication…have any side effects?” Drift asked, not wanting to seem too eager.

“Nausea, feelings of disassociation from your body, and fatigue,” Ratchet recited. “Not much considering the alternative.”

“I’ll take it,” Drift said.

“I thought so.” Ratchet handed Drift a vial, already prepared and waiting on the exam table, and Drift poured it through his intake. It was bitter and left a lingering aftertaste, but Drift felt the symptoms ease almost immediately. The constant tightness in his processor and tension in his limbs unwound, leaving him tired.

“How long is the course?” Drift asked after the medication had settled. “Do you just give me a week’s worth and I keep track of taking it?”

“No way,” Ratchet said. “No drugs outside the Medibay, even the stuff like this that can’t get you high. You’ll be up here once a day to take it under medical supervision. It’s a taper dose, lasting one month total.” It was actually three weeks, the fourth being placebo treatments so that the medic could monitor the patient closely even after they were off the medication. But Drift wasn’t supposed to know that.

“Then I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of each other,” Drift said. It was a line he had planned for the medics he thought he might be able to successfully flirt with, and he’d had zero intention of using it on Ratchet before it had slipped out. He decided to go all in, though, and followed the line up with a shy smile.

“I suppose so,” Ratchet said, the ever-present gruffness in his voice canting up a notch. His optics flashed to Drift’s, then quickly away, and he changed the subject. “How did you get that sword in here?”

“It’s a religious artifact. It would be against my faith to leave it behind.”

“Really? I get that they let through trinkets, but a sword?” Ratchet looked genuinely puzzled.

Drift shrugged. “It’s the rules.” He’d made sure of that. “You have a problem with it?” he tried.

“I have a problem with religious exemptions to the justice system. But clearly the people in charge don’t.”

“Why? It’s not like it’s hurting anyone.”

“You really want to know?” Ratchet didn’t wait for Drift to answer. “Because religion is a crutch. It keeps people from being a part of the real world. If you spend your whole prison sentence thinking Primus is the one really responsible for your crimes, no one ever learns.”

“I happen to think that faith can be leveraged to help someone become better,” Drift said, giving Ratchet a thin smile. “But what would I know?”

Ratchet looked at Drift, considering now, and Drift realized that he’d forgotten why he was here. “Can I leave now?” he asked, suddenly uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken. Mostly, with how he wanted to sit in a bar with Ratchet and a glass of Engex and have this conversation all day.

“You’re free to go.” Ratchet had already turned away.

Drift stood up, resolutely ignoring the way his head spun slightly from either the withdrawal or the medication, and walked towards the door. He made sure to keep his optics from straying back to the exit hatch in the corner. He was about to knock on the door to let the guard outside know that they were done when—

“Drift.”

It was the first time Ratchet had called him by his name this whole appointment. It might have been the first time Ratchet had called him by his name ever.

Drift turned around without speaking.

“About Rodimus’s mission.” Ratchet’s voice was quiet.

“Yes?”

“I would have gone with you.”

That seemed to be all that Ratchet had to say. “That means a lot,” Drift replied. It was hard to keep his optics on Ratchet and away from the exit hatch as he said “One way or another, I’m confident that we’ll all end up where we’re meant to be.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check the tags for new characters & warnings. Also, if you hate cliffhangers, you might want to wait a couple days for chapter 3 before reading this one.

One of the first things that the Provisional Government had done after arresting Rodimus and effectively grounding the Lost Light was establish the prison. Even with the planet’s vague law system—the neutrals had no unifying set of laws, but only reluctantly followed the Autobots’—crime in New Iacon had quickly outpaced the availability of detention cells inside Kimia.

One group of neutrals proposed a retrofit of their ship. Not much work had been needed: it was already outfitted for Cybertronians and had a whole level for rooms that resembled prison cells. It took barely a week before Autobot, Decepticon, and neutral offenders were being moved in. There were people like Cyclonus whose crimes hadn’t been erased by the reintegration act, people like Rodimus who the government felt justified in locking up because of the seriousness of the crime they were accused of, and people whose offenses had been relatively minor but wouldn’t be able to stand trial until the Provisional Government had hammered out a constitution. Drift had heard a rumor that even Overlord was being kept on the ship, though he had yet to see any evidence of _that_. The guards that the government hired were mostly neutrals, and the prisoners were mostly, but not all, aligned. Bumblebee had talked his way into managing the place.

It wasn’t until the second morning of his stay that Drift was able to catch a glimpse of Rodimus. Drift was being escorted down the main cell block to meet his prison work detail by a silent, expressionless guard.  He didn’t look up as he walked, knowing that some bots in here would take eye contact as a challenge. Instead, he waited until he sensed the bright hues of Rodimus’s familiar aura off to one side. He looked up from the floor and met Rodimus’s optics.

Rodimus jumped to his feet at the sight of him. “Drift?” His voice was more wounded than shocked.

Drift nodded once, slowly, not breaking eye contact and doing his best to project calm, even though his systems had seized up a little at seeing Rodimus. In a way, Rodimus seeing him here was a step further down this path. Further confirmation that he was really doing this.

He’d been too unmoored by the sight of Rodimus to even notice who his cellmate was—getting Rodimus’s cellmate on board with the plan was a crucial step. The same was true of his own, but he was already confident that he could swing Pipes. In talking to him the night before—talking that Pipes had done ninety percent of—there had been three common threads: that Pipes found his sword to be incredibly cool and was very impressed that Drift got to have it in here, that Pipes thought that he’d gotten himself arrested heroically, saving some bot from a bar fight, and that all he wanted was to be on the outside with that bot, who he’d apparently met that night but since become fast friends with. Drift was still unsure how he would leverage any of that to convince him to help.

There was another issue, he realized as the guard prodded him forward and he lost sight of Rodimus. If Drift was going to his work detail, and Rodimus was in his cell, that meant that Rodimus wasn’t on Drift’s work detail.

Drift had a plan for that. But it wasn’t a pleasant one.

Work consisted of reshaping crumbled bits of metal into useful shapes. He had one machine that made screws and another that made square plates. All he had to do was sift through buckets of scrap metal for pieces approximately the correct size to become either, feed them into the appropriate machine, and put the finished results in a different bin. It was tiring, hot work, but not difficult. He had plenty of time to sort through, in his head, whether the part of the plan that took place in these workshops would be feasible. The guards clustered in one corner of the wide, poorly-lit space, and they didn’t assign the bots on the detail particular workstations, which were all identical. The two corners that would lead to air circulation shafts below were exposed with wide enough gaps between the nearest workstations and the wall for Drift’s plan to work.

If he had Rodimus’s help.

If.

After a few hours, one of the guards blew a whistle and the others in the room immediately stopped working. Drift followed suit, not wanting to stand out and also not particularly wanting to make any more screws. The guard opened up the door and escorted them out of the room and into the hallway outside.

“What’s going on?” Drift asked the badgeless and unfamiliar bot next to him.

“They take us out once a shift so that the machines can cool off and the cleaning crew can wipe them down,” the other bot said without even looking Drift’s way.

Drift kept his expression still as he considered that. Hopefully twice-daily cleanings wouldn’t interfere with the work that had to be done in these rooms. Then he laid eyes on a bot being led out of an adjacent door to the workshop and pushed the possibility out of his mind.

Prowl didn’t seem to have been changed at all by imprisonment. He retained the haughty look and posture Drift had grown accustomed to. He could just as well have been standing on the helm of a ship he was commanding as be in his current situation, which was standing in a hallway outside prison workshops, a prisoner’s band on his chest identical to Drift’s.

Even the most important Autobots were at the same level in prison. Autobot ranks had no meaning to the neutrals.

The guards didn’t seem to be keeping the prisoners from milling around, just watching them for in case any fights broke out or if somebody tried to make a run for it. Drift approached Prowl slowly. Prowl’s head rotated a few degrees toward him, and then he went right back to staring at the workshop door.

“I have a trade to propose,” Drift said quietly. Prowl had positioned himself far from the nearest guard, but he didn’t want any of the other inmates to overhear either. “I can give you the information that you were thrown in here over, if you do me a specific favor in return.”

Prowl’s head didn’t move to acknowledge Drift. “I’m listening,” he said.

“I know the secret you were after,” Drift said. Prowl’s arrest, luckily, had happened around the same time as Rodimus’s, so Drift had still been allowed to hang around High Command during the fallout. Apparently, Prowl had propositioned Chromedome to do mnemosurgery on Overlord in order to find out how the Decepticons had created their Phase Sixers. Chromedome had refused, and then told Bumblebee about the plan. Prowl’s explanations of his behavior in the trial that had followed had been half-crazed, like he’d forgotten that the Decepticons weren’t—at least in technicality—their enemy anymore. Imprisoning Prowl for a crime that he hadn’t actually been able to commit (or, in this case, manipulate someone else into committing) had seemed harsh at the time, but after Rodimus’s arrest Drift had come to suspect that there was more to it.

That wasn’t why he was here, though. Prowl would watch out for himself, and that was what Drift was relying on. Prowl would have close and far rings of allies in this prison, controlled by a common cause or by blackmail or by some other means. One of them, Drift was sure, would have what Drift needed for the final phase of the breakout.

“And what is it you want in return?” Prowl asked.

Drift leaned in closer to Prowl and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I need to be transferred to the other work shift, and I need a keycard with access to the emergency hatch in the Medibay. Two weeks from now.”

Prowl looked at him then, his blue eyes cold, calculating. “This is about Rodimus,” he asserted after only a few seconds of scrutiny.

Drift cringed. He had anticipated the possibility that Prowl would figure out his game, but not so quickly, not so decisively. But he’d laid out his hand already, and now he had to live with it. Drift maintained Prowl’s eye contact and nodded.

There was no time to talk further. One of the guards blew another whistle and Drift rushed back to his side of the hallway, filing into the workshop behind the rest of the bots. He sat down at his station newly energized. Things were in motion. It was working. It would work. It had to.

\--

The bars to the cell winked off and Pipes leapt up. Drift cocked his head at the open space where bars had been warily. “What’s going on?” Drift had figured out what the prisoners did for work—and more importantly, in what part of the ship they did it—by spying on some guards during their downtime, but that didn’t seem to be what was going on now.

“Track time!” Pipes replied. “Once a day we get to go out on the track. People with mobile alt modes can spin our wheels, everyone else just gets some time out of the cell. It’s mandatory,” Pipes said, motioning for Drift to follow him out of the cramped space.

Drift grabbed his sword from its spot on the wall and quickly sheathed it before walking out of the cell. Pipes chatted and Drift scrutinized their surroundings as they walked. Other cell doors along the hall had opened, and all the inmates were streaming in the same direction. Drift stuck close behind Pipes, who led him up a set of stairs and into an expansive space that seemed to take up nearly a whole level of the ship.

Drift hadn’t been sure how much the people who had reformatted this ship into a prison had changed the layout of the stadium. Not much, by the looks of it. The ring had been widened to accommodate a decently-sized track, probably about half a mile in circumference. They’d even kept the stadium seats surrounding the ring, but those had been moved back a ways to enlarge the space between.

That was all that he had time to discern before a hand yanked him by one shoulder, turning him in a half-circle. It was a familiar unstoppable force, painted like fire. Rodimus’s face was right in his. “What happened?” Rodimus hissed.

Drift leaned his head close to Rodimus’s. “We’re going to break out of here,” he said as quietly as he could manage.

Rodimus’s optics widened. He released Drift’s shoulder, and his fingers glanced over the black prisoner’s band on Drift’s chest. “How?” he asked.

“I’ve done it before,” he said simply. Then, “I have the plans to the ship.”

Rodimus’s optics widened even further. “No way!” he said. “That’s impossible. The searches—”

“Only look for illicit documents,” Drift said. “I had to get creative.” He pointed out a tattoo on his arm.

“It looks like a weird matrix.”

“Look closer.”

Rodimus did. Drift saw the moment that it dawned on him. Rodimus grabbed Drift’s arm and brought the tattoo closer to his optics. He traced some of the light-colored lines within it with one finger. “Is that—”

“Air circulation, plumbing, security—just about everything you’re not allowed to have stored,” Drift said. He was proud of this bit, difficult as it had been to design the tattoos and uncomfortable as he was hiding behind their religious significance.

_The breakout is the priority. Consequences are for later._

“You can really do this?” Rodimus was tracing a different tattoo now, his voice hushed.

“I can.” Drift tried to project more confidence than he felt.

Oddly, Rodimus shook his head and stepped back. “I would never have asked you—”

“You didn’t,” Drift interrupted. “I chose to.”

\--

The prison cells were small, cluttered, and oddly bright. Each of them contained two full-sized recharge berths hooked up to energon infusers, with only about a foot of space between the ends of the berths and the bars of the cell. Along the back wall there were shelves for prisoners to store reading material and whatever personal trinkets they managed to scavenge for themselves in here. Air circulation, which was more important when the ship was actually in space, happened through tiny ventilation hatches on each wall, each of them too small for Drift to even fit his fist through.

There was a fluorescent light exposed on the ceiling that only turned off during designated recharge hours. It was unsettlingly bright and seemed to fill every corner of the cell. The light was too bright to look at directly. It gave the impression that they were being watched, that there was nowhere to hide.

The _false_ impression. It was a scare tactic to keep unruly prisoners in line. Drift was familiar with the psychology of such measures from the time he’d spent on both sides of the bars.

The recharge cycle was about to start, Drift knew. Pipes was chattering about his friend again, and Drift was listening and trying too figure out the best angle to approach converting Pipes to his cause. Should he do it through the Lost Light? The chance to get out of prison faster? Sticking it to the man he’d also considered, but he’d essentially discounted it since Pipes didn’t seem all that interested in politics.

He was planning to ask Pipes how long he was in here for, information that would help him pick an approach, when a guard stepped up to the cell. “Drift of Rodion?”

“Yes?”

“With me.”

After catching a confused—yet somehow still impressed—look from Pipes, Drift complied. He stuck his wrists through the bars, allowing his hands to be cuffed together, and then the bars winked away, giving him just enough space to step out.

“What’s going on?” he asked the guard. The guard didn’t answer or even seem to acknowledge that he’d been asked a question. Drift didn’t push it. It was important that he didn’t make trouble here, that he had as few eyes focused on him as possible.

The guard led him to an elevator and pushed the button that led to the track level—the only button that there was. The workshops were accessed from the cells by a different elevator and adjoining set of stairs, and the bridge-slash- administrative level was only accessible by yet another that went up from the track level.

Drift turned toward the guard when the doors opened, unsure what he was here for. Was he going to see Bumblebee, who had been serving as the interim warden? Had they figured out his game?

But the guard didn’t lead him towards the topmost elevator. Instead, he shoved Drift out the elevator doors. Drift stumbled out onto the track alone as the doors snapped shut behind him.

He straightened and tested the handcuffs—way too tight to get out of without doing something drastic—and looked around. The track level seemed smaller in the low lighting, with the edges of the room swallowed in shadow. It was empty. Why was Drift here?

Something hit the back of his head, hard enough to dent his helm. Drift wavered, straining against the handcuffs, but managed to remain upright. “Who’s there?” he called.

There was no answer, but when Drift turned around there was a figure about his height right in his face. They were covered in a cloak, masking their face. They didn’t look to be armed, but Drift was wary. He fell into a defensive stance, wincing to know that he couldn’t access his sword with his hands cuffed together in front of him.

The cloaked figure whipped out a nightstick—the model that the guards used. What was happening? Drift leapt away from the taser, but the cloaked figure anticipated him—a leg was extended to trip him and the nightstick was jammed into his throat as he fell.

Things were hazy for a few minutes after that. He body felt like it was on fire, the electricity from the taser rendering his limbs nonfunctional. He could barely think, could barely see, but he was sure that he was being dragged. Then his hands were being moved, clamped to something.

When awareness returned Drift was lying on his side, his hands chained to a stiff metal ring that protruded out of the ground. Drift had no idea if that was part of the level’s original design or new to the prison.

“What do you want?” he asked the figure, who was crouching over him silently.

“I think you know,” said a familiar voice that Drift couldn’t quite place. He eyed the figure up and down looking for any glimpse of plating, any clue who this person could be and what it was they were referring to.

“I don’t,” Drift said. “There must have been some mistake—”

The figure laughed, a harsh, mocking noise that some part of Drift wanted to flinch away from. He kept his optics on the hood the figure was wearing—where their own optics should be. “No mistake,” they said, and then suddenly they were holding a knife in one hand and grasping Drift’s foot in the other. Drift tried to struggle away, but they were strong, and he was still feeling the effects of the taser shot. So all he could do when the figure cut surgically through the lines leading to his foot was stare defiantly and refuse to scream. “Tell me about Phase Sixers,” they said, pointing the knife now at Drift’s face but maintaining their iron grip on his leg.

Drift felt his eyes bug out. “That’s what this is about? No way. I said what my terms are. Prowl gets that information when I get what I need.”

The figure did something else with the knife, cutting deep into Drift’s ankle. This time he wasn’t able to stifle a quick gasp of pain. “Prowl will get the information when Prowl’s ready, and Prowl is ready now.”

The figure made one more cut to his ankle, and then Drift felt indescribable pain shooting up from his foot. “What did you do?” he asked, his voice coming out more strangled than he’d planned on.

“I cut all of the energon lines to your foot but left the nervecircuits intact,” the figure explained. “When the nervecircuit is cut, it signals the foot and the limb attached to it to cauterize so that it can be reattached. Not so when it’s cut like this.” The figure traced the edge of the wiring of the nerve with their knife, and Drift hissed as the pain multiplied. “This way, your foot dies. Permanently. Unless, of course, you tell me what I want to know.”

Another wave of pain seized Drift and he thrashed, but the figure held strong. “Fine,” he said, once he was sure that his voice would come out steady. “I’m not going to tell him until I have what I need. We’re both going to have to live with that.”

“Will you?” With lightning speed, the knife darted out and sliced through the main fuel line in his leg. “Those are the words of someone sure they won’t die tonight.”

“You can’t kill me. I have information that Prowl needs.”

“Plenty of people know what you know. Prowl will get his information. You just have a chance to make it easier for all of us.” They sliced the main fuel line to his other leg. The feeling of his fuel coating the ground beneath him was almost as bad as the pain.

Drift did his best to meet the figure’s optics and shook his head. No. He hadn’t come all this way to lose a crucial part of the plan so easily.

The figure shifted so that their knee was digging into his chest and Drift finally caught a flash of pink plating. “Arcee?” he gasped, startled to realize that he was losing so much fuel his voxcoder was already fritzing. “Don’t do this. He’ll get what he needs—”

“If you’re gonna say what you’re supposed to say, then say it,” she said. Having been identified, she met Drift’s optics as she sliced the main fuel line to one arm. She transferred the knife to her other hand and held it still over Drift’s other shoulder.

Drift just looked up at her. No.

She sliced into the fuel line. He was too weak, now, to even try to stop her. She shifted her weight and then he felt the knife sliding through the lines to his legs that she’d cut before that had already begun to repair themselves.

He could actually die of this.

He tried to speak up, to tell Arcee that he didn’t know anything, that he’d been playing Prowl and had been hoping he’d never need to cash in. But it was too late. All that came out of his voxcoder was static. His optics had already powered down, with all other non-emergency systems.

Drift lay there, unable to move, unable to see, but refusing to succumb to the darkness. 


	3. Chapter 3

There was noise to Drift’s left. Voices. _Help. Please._

“Oh, Primus.” He heard. “Someone call medical.”

Distantly, Drift realized that Arcee was gone. Must have fled when some guards who weren’t under Prowl’s thumb had shown up.

He must have lost consciousness then, because the next thing he knew, his optics were functioning again and he was opening them to light so bright he couldn’t make out anything else for a moment. There was a split second after waking where nothing in particular was happening, where he could have been anywhere, anytime.

Then the pain in his foot set in like an electric shock and the night came back to him all at once.

He gasped and tried to sit up, but his body crashed back onto the berth, still weak. He hadn’t died. But he almost had. He had almost ruined everything.

“Oh good, you’re awake,” Ratchet’s voice seemed to float into Drift’s awareness from a distance, even though he could hear him rummaging around and feel his aura close by the berth. “You idiot.”

Drift managed to turn his head to look over at Ratchet, who was frowning. Drift’s optics were slowly adjusting to the brightness of the Medibay, and for a moment it looked like Ratchet was all that existed, everything beyond him white-tinged and fuzzy.  “I’m sorry,” he said, after making sure his voxcoder had rebooted.

Ratchet raised his optics to the ceiling. “Sorry for what? It’s not like you jumped yourself.”

Drift turned his optics away at the reminder—more salient than the resounding aches—of what had happened. “For being an idiot,” he said, trying to keep his voice light.

“It’s not your fault, Drift. I may not be a nice person but I’m not so heartless that I actually blame the victim for the crime. I need to check on your leg again, is that okay?”

Drift shivered but nodded. Ratchet walked around to the end of the berth and moved the warming tarp that was covering his body so that his foot was exposed.

Drift cringed at the sight of it. The plating was visibly greyed, and looking at it, oddly, compounded the pain. He could barely feel the pressure of Ratchet’s hands as the medic turned it to check on the weld lines he’d made. “Is it going to heal?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady.

“It will,” Ratchet said. “But it will take some time. I’ve already put a sensation blocker on it, but we’ll have to figure out what dosage give you the best ability to function. You won’t be able to walk like this, but most of the pain should be gone after a day or so.”

_A day_. That was already so much longer than he wanted to have to think about this. So much longer than he wanted this to last. Just like that, all of it hit Drift at once—that he had a physical handicap that would make breaking Rodimus out substantially harder, that Prowl had refused to cooperate with his terms, that he _could have died_ , and then where would they be? Rodimus would still be trapped here and they would _never_ find the Knights—

He put his hands over his optics, needing something he could use to block out the world.

Ratchet’s hands stilled. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re safe. You’re hurt, but you’ll recover.”

“I know.” Drift’s voice came out strangled. Dimly, he realized that his hands were shaking.

Ratchet placed a hand on Drift’s lower leg, above the injury. For a moment, the warmth of it very nearly drowned out the pain. Ratchet didn’t move until the shaking stopped.

\--

Ratchet released Drift from the Medibay after a full day. At some point, some guards had come to question him, but Drift had insisted that nothing had happened. Who had done this to him? He didn’t know. How had he gotten out of his cell? Someone had come to get him. He’d assumed they were a guard, but he’d never seen them before so he couldn’t be sure.

He could tell that the questioners weren’t happy with him, but their feelings weren’t even at the bottom of his list of things to worry about.

At the top was his foot. He’d been able to walk on it, albeit painfully, when Ratchet released him, but the pain at even the short trek from his cell to the track was…distracting. He would deal with it. He had to. But his life would be much, much easier if it would just heal faster.

Second was Pipes. He’d given himself wiggle room for how much time he’d need to break out of prison, made it so that if everything went correctly, he’d have Rodimus out of here by a week before his execution date.

He’d already wasted half that time. He needed to get Pipes on board and start digging a path out of their cell as soon as possible. Rodimus had to convince his cellmate to do the same.

Third on the list was Prowl. And the only reason it was so low was because he _really_ didn’t feel like dealing with that.

Thinking back to the night with Arcee made his hands go cold, but he’d been running over those last few minutes of consciousness over and over again anyway. He’d been planning to break, to tell Arcee that he didn’t know the secret of the Phase Sixers, that he never had, that it was just convenient to say because as a former Decepticon, there was a chance that he _could_ have known. But he hadn’t had the chance. Had Arcee heard him trying to speak, though? Had she figured it out, somehow?

And what did Prowl have in mind for him next?

He was sitting by himself in the first row of stadium seats next to the track. Pipes had hung around him for a bit, but he’d obviously wanted to join a race, so Drift had sent him off to do that. Rodimus was on the other side of the yard, brooding. Drift should have gone over to him, but, well, he didn’t have any good news. He’d prefer to avoid Rodimus until he did. Drift didn’t want to seem like he’d been bringing false hope.

The bell rang to signal the end of yard time and the beginning of the second work shift—Drift’s, still, unfortunately. He stood up and made to hobble over to the exit, where guards would escort half the prisoners to their cells and the other half to the workshops.

Drift made to join the workshop group, but he was stopped by a guard. “You’re not listed for this shift,” he said, motioning Drift towards the other group.

“Oh.” Drift assumed Ratchet had put him on some kind of medical leave, which was kind of him, but would prove deeply unhelpful if it went on for too long. “For how long?” he asked.

“Forever. You’ve been switched to the A shift,” the guard said. “Get in the other line.”

Drift walked away, shocked. Was it a coincidence that he’d gotten exactly what he’d wanted, somehow?

A hand close around his upper arm and he jerked away, ignoring the shock of pain from his foot. He turned to see that the hand belonged to Prowl.

“This is your payment,” Prowl whispered, maintaining his grip on Drift’s arm. “For services not yet rendered.”

Drift could only nod. Prowl released his arm, and Drift walked over to the appropriate group, where Rodimus and Pipes both seemed to be watching him. _Services not yet rendered._ Whatever the price was, he’d pay it. There were priorities. It would be worth it.

\--

As they walked into the workshop the next day, Drift poked Rodimus’s arm and jerked his head in the direction of the two workstations in the corner. Rodimus raced ahead, faster than Drift could move without risking falling, and took one of the stations, putting a leg up on the chair of the other one to reserve it.

Drift arrived a few seconds later, and Rodimus affectedly swung his leg over to his own side. Their stations were cattycorner to each other, with a square just large enough for a bot of Drift’s size to fit through outlined by their stations and the corner where the walls met.

“There’s a reason I need us to be in this spot,” Drift said to Rodimus as they worked in tandem, grasping bits from separate boxes of scrap metal. “See the air circulation hatch on the floor there?”

Rodimus nodded, optics flicking from his work to Drift and back again almost imperceptibly fast.

“That hatch leads to another one in the Medibay. In the Medibay there’s an emergency exit that leads us right to freedom. It needs an access card, but I’ll have one.”

Rodimus’s optics widened. “We’re breaking out from _here_?” he asked.

“No. From our cells, during recharge hours. And…please don’t use that term in public.”

“How? The ventilation hatches in our cells are tiny.”

“Yeah, that’s the point. Otherwise it would be too easy and everyone would be doing it.” Drift leaned closer, suddenly even more paranoid about being overheard. He could feel the warmth of Rodimus’s aura at the side of his helm as he whispered “Underneath each energon infuser is the least secure part of the cell. The tiling needs to be thinner to accommodate the lines going through it. All you need to do is unscrew the infuser from the floor and clear out the connective glue. The only issue is that you have to disable the infuser, or else it leaks everywhere and we kiss any semblance of secrecy goodbye. Cellmates could survive by sharing an infuser for a while, but it’d be inconvenient and suspicious. So I’m saving that part of the plan for later.”

Rodimus nodded, looking impressed. “So what happens in here?”

Drift flicked his optics to the ceiling. There was a tile in the corner that had wiring sticking out of it, which Drift knew came from the same airspace that the energon infuser lines led to. “We can get there from our cells. We’ll be opening it from the inside, but we’ll need to do it in advance, during recharge hours. Then we can get from here” he nodded to the hatch in the floor “to the Medibay.”

“Wow,” Rodimus breathed, and Drift couldn’t help the warmth that rushed through his chest at the warmth in Rodimus’s voice. Then the feeling went away just as fast when Rodimus asked “How’d you get your hands on the plans for this place, anyway?”

Drift cringed. “I already had them. I recognized the ship class when it first landed on Cybertron, before they even converted it.”

Rodimus nodded. He’d been there for the part where the provisional government decided that they needed a real prison for lawbreakers. Neither the nose of Kimia’s gun nor the few detention cells inside Kimia were going to cut it. The neutrals who had come on this ship had proposed it to be retrofitted into a prison and sold to the government, which everyone had agreed to.

Drift wasn’t sure if Rodimus knew what the ship had been before. Drift wasn’t sure what the Cybertronians who had brought it here had been doing with it, but he knew that its purpose was to transport exotic fauna across the galaxy to be bought and sold. When he’d been caught and imprisoned on one back when he was a neutral, the owners had already made the (very easy) transition from animal transport to slave trading. 

Drift had threatened to kill anyone who had aimed to buy him—consequences be damned—for so long that he became a liability to his captors. Then he’d struck a deal with them: he would do maintenance work on the ship, for no pay, to buy his own freedom. At that point the Shanix had had almost no value in the intergalactic market, and he’d had no way to access his personal funds anyway.

He’d learned the ship aft to stern, absorbing as much knowledge as he could from routine maintenance tasks. He’d uploaded the plans from the ship’s hard drive to his processer one day when he was left alone on the bridge for a few seconds. And he’d used them.

Once he figured out what he could do, he put it in motion at the next planet they landed on. At night, when all of the officers were asleep in their quarters on the top level of the ship, Drift had disabled the ship’s backup generator and then triggered an electrical shutdown. That served to free the prisoners, who he’d led out the emergency hatch in the Medibay section. Once they were safe, Drift had flooded the bottom floor with backup fuel, reset the electrical system, and blown the thing off the map, barely escaping from the blast himself. The slavers had died in their beds.

It was the first violent thing he’d done after Crystal City. He knew, intellectually, that he’d been right to. That those aliens had to die for their former captives to be safe. But it had always haunted him all the same. The whole event had been an unwelcome reminder of the person that he had been before.  

“I was on one of these ships as a neutral. Not this one. But that’s how I got the plans,” Drift said.

Rodimus accepted that with a nod. “You’re amazing. This is really going to work.”

Just then, the door to the workshop was opened and flung against the wall by a pair of guards. Drift kept his eyes on his work, doing his best not to draw their attention even though they hadn’t even started working on disabling the security on the grate yet. But they came straight for him anyway. Drift felt his back tense up at every step they took towards him.

“Rodimus, with me,” one of them said. Drift was relieved for a moment that he wasn’t the target of whatever this was, but only for a moment. Guards taking Rodimus somewhere could only bode poorly.

“Where are you taking him?” Drift asked, unable to mask his concern.

“Solitary confinement,” the guard responded.

Rodimus, who was currently being strapped into handcuffs, gaped. _“Why_?”

“You’re less than a week from your execution. If we let you interact with other prisoners you’re liable to cause trouble,” the guard said.

Drift met Rodimus’s optics, panicked. Less than a week? The date was almost three weeks away.

“No.” Rodimus was shaking his head. “No, that’s not right.”

“The schedule changed. It’s above my paygrade. Don’t make this hard on yourself. If I had three days to live, I’d want them to be as pleasant as possible.”

A wave of cold fear gripped Drift’s spark. _Three days_?

Drift kept eye contact with Rodimus as he was led away until he and the guards disappeared out the door. When he looked back to his workstation, he noticed that his hands were shaking.

_Three days_. He couldn’t do this in three days. Even if everything worked out perfectly, it wasn’t possible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've started writing a CDRW companion fic in this same universe because I have no self-control, so ~~stay tuned for that~~. The first chapter of that fic occurs concurrently with Chapter 4 & I want to have everything drafted before I start posting, so it might be about a week before the next update. 
> 
> Thanks for reading and commenting! And a belated thank you to @notwhelmedyet for reading through the unpolished draft of this and pointing out half a dozen serious plot errors. The fic is going to be much better for the time she spent looking at it. =D


	4. Chapter 4

Drift tried to calm his anxiety over Rodimus’s situation as he walked into Ratchet’s office. Ratchet needed to see him as cooperative, agreeable, and complacent. He couldn’t show any sign that he was here for a reason other than to be punished for his crime.

“How’s the leg today?” Ratchet, as usual, greeted him with what most wouldn’t consider to be a greeting at all.

Strangely, the sight of Ratchet and his oh-so-predictable gruff mannerisms was reassuring. He didn’t have time for this. But then, even if he worked day and night, he wouldn’t be able to get Rodimus out in time.

He needed to figure out another solution. And so far his processor was coming up blank. His best idea was to go back to Prowl, who would run through every possible scenario and spit the most likely ones back at him. That is, if he was inclined to help. Also, Drift didn’t want to involve him if he didn’t have to.

“Drift.” Ratchet’s voice held a note of genuine concern that Drift might have been proud to have pried out, if the circumstances were different. As it was, he was almost sure that the cause was his embarrassing breakdown the other day, and he winced at the reminder.

“Sorry. Spaced out. Uh, about the same. Getting a little more movement back.”

“That’s good. That’s really good, actually. You been walking on it a lot?”

“Haven’t exactly been given an option.”

Ratchet met his optics. “I offered to—”

“Let me off work, I know, but a little discomfort is better than having to sit in the cell all day,” Drift said. Ratchet had gone back to examining his foot, which Drift thought was looking closer to its usual color scheme, but the going was slow. “So, can you knock me down to a less intense sensation blocker?”

“You are the only junkie convict I know who would take a fast recovery over a comfortable one.”

Drift winced. “You’re the only doctor I know who actually refers to people as junkies.”

To Drift’s complete shock, that got a smile out of Ratchet. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll take it down a level. The pain’ll be worse, but it shouldn’t be unbearable.”

Ratchet grabbed a few tools and did something to the wiring of Drift’s lower leg. Suddenly, the pain in his foot went from a simmer to a full burn. He did his best not to react. Ratchet was right. It was manageable.

“And here you are,” Ratchet said, having stepped away to grab Drift’s addiction medication dose. He handed it over, and Drift took it without comment.

Handing back the vial, he was faced with the door, and its inevitable exit to the hallway outside the Medibay and the impossible load of problems that would be facing him again as soon as he left this oddly soothing white-and-metal room.

“Hey.” Ratchet’s concerned voice was back. “It’s not really my place to comment, but you seem jumpy today. Whatever happened the other night, whatever’s going on now, you’re not alone in it. Bee and the guards really are here to protect you.”

“And you?” Drift asked, flashing Ratchet a crooked smile. It was more instinct than anything. Ratchet’s words had awakened the stirrings of an idea, and he was trying to think it through before the threads of it slipped through his fingers.”

“And me,” Ratchet said, all gruffness. “Get out, I’ve got patients to see.”

Drift did, hiding a smile as the guard led him back to his cell. If this plan worked, his chances—Rodimus’s chances—had gone from zero to _maybe_.

\--

The track was as raucous as usual. Drift supposed that was to be expected. None of these mechs’ worlds had been shattered by the change in Rodimus’s execution date. Drift was disinterestedly watching an argument that looked like it was about to build to a fistfight between Cyclonus and Whirl as Pipes chatted away beside him.

“Riptide called and he’s coming to visit me, isn’t that great?”

“Yeah, Pipes, that’s great,” Drift said, internally reeling from the revelation that the object of Pipes’ infatuation was Riptide, of all mechs. More importantly, someone who had planned to join the Lost Light crew. That was his in. Before Pipes could say anything else, Drift decided to take the plunge. “There’s actually been something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

“Oh, yeah? What—” Pipes trailed off, optics snapping to something over Drift’s shoulder. “Actually let’s chat later! I’ve got, uh, places to talk to, people to—oh, whatever, bye!” He was gone before Drift could get in another word.

Drift turned around to see what had spooked Pipes and came face to face with Prowl, who took a seat next to Drift. Arcee was nowhere to be seen.

 _Your payment…for services not yet rendered_. It looked like Prowl was going to cash in. And he couldn’t have picked a worse time.

“Can’t this wait?” Drift asked, keeping his sigh out of his voice.

“No. I need you to set up a meeting for two days from now.”

“Why? We’re talking right now.”

“Not a meeting with me.” Prowl’s voice was icy. “Between yourself and Chromedome. Tell him whatever you want, just get him to come here. Two days.”

“Ooo-kay. And what am I supposed to tell him during this meeting?”

“You’re going to convince him to operate on Overlord.”

Drift looked at Prowl incredulously, propriety be damned. “If you couldn’t manage that, what makes you think I can?”

“You’re _arguing_ with me?”

“You tortured me.”

Prowl’s optics burned, and Drift quickly realized what a horrendously bad idea that had been. Should have kept his damn mouth shut.

But Prowl, apparently prioritizing having Drift’s help over his desire to pummel him into the ground, just looked away, expression cooling. “I did no such thing. But I ought to point out that you were dishonest about…certain information that you claimed to have.”

“Did your homework, then. I expected you to figure it out eventually, but I had hoped that it would be after—” He cut himself off. _after I was long gone_.

“I don’t care what you’re planning, Drift. I have bigger problems than what’s happening with Rodimus. But if you cooperate, I think you’ll find a partnership between us to be mutually beneficial. If you must know, I’m asking you because the prison switchboard has been instructed to not let me contact him.”

Drift didn’t even have time to nod in response before Prowl got up and started walking to the other side of the track.

\--

“Breaking _out_?” Pipes voice, though shocked, was thankfully pitched to a whisper.

Drift nodded, sitting with his hands clenching his knees on the berth across from Pipes’s. “Yes. Getting off this ship and onto the Lost Light, then taking off and not coming back until we find the Knights of Cybertron.”

“Wow,” Pipes whispered, rearranging himself so that his optics faced the ceiling, fingers laced together under his helm. He was silent for a minute, and then turned his head back towards Drift. “Can Riptide come?”

“Of course. As long as he can keep a secret until we’re ready.”

Pipes actually frowned at that. “Is there any chance that we could maybe…kidnap him, the night of?”

“I guess I could arrange that,” Drift said. He’d been trying not to ask too much of the help he had on the outside. His only ally in this was deeply suspicious of Drift’s plan, but Drift was hoping that he, too, wanted to find the Knights of Cybertron enough to sacrifice some of his personal biases for it. Right now, with the countdown to Rodimus’s execution ticking way too fast, Drift was already relying on him more than he’d ever wanted to.

“So how’s this going to work?” Pipes asked, all thoughts of recharge apparently forgotten. The only lights in the room were emitted from the energon infusers in each back corner. Drift gestured to the one behind his berth and explained the relevant step of the plan. The glue holding the tiles that housed the energon lines was the same as that holding the rest of the cell together, but the tile itself was thinner. Thin enough to be maneuvered up from the floor if a mech crushed one finger in the process.

Drift didn’t tell Pipes the last part, though. No sense in freaking him out this early. Besides, that step would be Drift’s problem.

Drift shook the couple of pieces of metal he’d snagged from work—too warped to be used, too small to be missed—out of a compartment, and crouched next to the infuser. The area around it was lit well enough by the soft glow it emitted for Drift to be able to see where the tile met the rest of the floor and dig the sharpest tip of metal he had into the glue between them.

“We’re starting _now_?” Pipes asked.

“Yeah. Guards only patrol once an hour during the recharge cycle. During the day we’d get caught for sure,” Drift said, digging deeper. This process was going to be several hours’ worth of work even if they didn’t stand the chance of getting interrupted by guards. “Keep a lookout, okay? We can recharge during our off-shift. Besides, it’s only a few weeks.”

“I thought Rodimus’s execution date got moved up,” Pipes said. “Wouldn’t that give us…two days?”

Drift worked at the glue for a minute, the light scraping noises sounding loud in the near-silence of the dark cell. “I’m working on that,” he said finally, even though that was maybe a bit of an overstatement. “Our goal, right here, tonight? It’s to get started making a way out of this cell. Everything else can wait.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops, i lied! Companion Fic will be posted concurrently starting with chapter 5 ;D 
> 
> you can find me at choomchoom on tumblr


	5. Chapter 5

Drift hung up the public comm device roughly, then he winced. Taking his anger out on prison property wasn’t going to help anything. It would probably just get him thrown into solitary with Rodimus, which would be the opposite of helpful.

He was running out of time to help him in the first place, though. And he was running out of options.

He took a deep, slow vent to calm himself and then picked the comm back up. He had paid for more time than listening to Ultra Magnus’s away message—again—had taken, so he figured he might as well complete his other task at the same time. He lifted the (slightly scratched, but otherwise undamaged from his tantrum) comm back up. He punched in a different number. This time, the bot at the other end picked up. “Hello?”

“Is this Chromedome?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Drift.”

Drift could hear a sigh over the comm line. “What do you want?”

“Just to meet. Visiting hours tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“I just want to talk.”

This time, the sigh was even more pronounced. “About what?”

“Take a guess.”

“Prowl got to you.” Chromedome’s tone was acid.

“What he wants is for the good of the Autobot cause.” Drift didn’t really believe what he was saying, but he knew that convincing Chromedome was the path from point A, where Drift owed Prowl, to point B, where Prowl might be inclined to give Drift what he needed.

There was a long silence. “Tell him I’ll do it.” Chromedome hung up before Drift could say anything else. Drift hung up too, frowning. That hadn’t gone quite like he’d expected, but Chromedome would do it. That was the deal. Drift hope that Prowl would take his word for it when he relayed the conversation to him at the track later that day. He could also only hope that Prowl would be pleased enough to get Drift the access card that he’d asked for originally.

But first, he still had a few minutes left on the comm. He punched in the other number one last time. Ultra Magnus didn’t answer, but Drift left a message—the first since Drift’s first unanswered call, back when he’d thought that Magnus had just been on duty or comming someone else. Before he’d gotten desperate.

“Well, we’re one day out, now. I know that we don’t always see eye to eye—that we usually don’t, for that matter—but if you care about any of this, at all, now’s the time to stand for it. You’re not going to get another chance.”

\--

“Shh! There’s a guard at the end of the hall.”

Drift stopped what he was doing and hid the tool behind the energon infuser before leaping as quickly and quietly as he could into his berth. Pipes did the same and Drift’s optics were shuttered when he heard the guard pass by without breaking his stride.

Drift’s shoulders dropped when he heard the guard’s steps receding down the hallway. He opened his optics and rolled off the berth again. If that was the only random patrol tonight—and he had no reason to think that it wouldn’t be—they might be able to get this thing done.

Drift cleared away the very last of the connective glue, exposing the dark open space that lay under the floors of the cells. Anticipating getting this far, he’d done the louder work of disconnecting the energon infuser from the tubing that ran through the floor earlier, when the prison had been loud with the shouts of disgruntled inmates desperate for something to yell at. Pipes singing a love song as loudly as he could had served as an impetus for all the jeers Drift had needed.

Now, all he had to do was push the infuser to one side and lift off the tile from underneath.

“I need your help.”

“But I’m on lookout!”

“There was just a patrol, so there shouldn’t be another one for a while. This is important.”

Reluctantly, Pipes dropped the metal shard he’d been using as a mirror to see out into the hallway. After placing it onto his berth, he walked over so that he was leaning over Drift’s shoulder. “What is it?”

“I’m ready to move the infuser. But we have to be quiet about it.”

“Are you sure we can’t do this during the day?”

“It needs to be tonight. I have a lot of work to do down there.”

Pipes shrugged. “Okay.” He came around to grasp one half of the infuser. Drift moved to an upright kneeling posture, ignoring the shot of pain that it caused in his foot, and grabbed the other.

“Just to the next tile,” he said. “On three.” He whispered the countdown and he and Pipes lifted. The machine, disconnected from the distribution system, wasn’t actually very heavy at all. They were able to set it down with only a small noise, one that could reasonably have ensued from a bot turning over on the berth during recharge.

Next was the hard part. Drift took the tool that he’d been using to clear away the glue and tried to use it to pry the tile up. The holes for the infuser line were tiny, drilled into the center of the tile, probably just in case someone decided to do the exact thing that they had done. If the lines hadn’t been specially engineered for prisoners, disconnecting the infuser would have allowed Drift to lift the tile off easily.

He’d known the dimensions, and guessed that the infuser setup would be the same as had been used on prisons throughout the war. No holes too big in the cell, to keep prisoners in and would-be rescuers out.

They hadn’t accounted for his level of desperation.

Drift stretched out his hand so that one finger, with its delicate electronics, was splayed wide on the floor. Then he used his back to lift the recharge slab ever so slightly off the ground. He shoved his finger under one of the posts and then moved so that the post came down on his finger, making no noise but a soft thump that, if Drift had estimated correctly, couldn’t be heard from outside their cell.

The pain was intense, and Drift couldn’t even register that and the amount of noise that the movement had made at the same time. It wasn’t over, though. Half-stupid with pain, and knowing that all of his work so far would be for nothing if he didn’t go through with this, he lifted up the berth again and readjusted his finger so that the post would come down on only the distal half of the crushed finger.

It did. Drift noticed this time that it had definitely made more noise than they could afford, and sat still for a moment, waiting for the telltale noise of footsteps in the hall. Pretending that they weren’t up to anything was going to get a whole lot harder now, with the infuser having to be obviously out of place for Drift to operate.

No noise came, and Pipes, optics flicking between the mirror into the hallway and Drift crouched on the floor of the cell, didn’t shout out another warning. They were safe, at least for another few minutes.

Minutes that Drift was determined to make the most of.

He took the makeshift lever he’d made out of his finger and slid the bent half into the thin crack between tiles. It fit, barely. He slid it over until he felt the section slip through into open air, and then bent his wrist so that the portion that was parallel to the rest of his fingers slid through as well. His finger throbbed in protest, but he ignored it as he started to lift the tile off the floor.

For a heartstopping second, it didn’t budge. Drift panicked, thinking that something must be wrong, that there must be more holding the tile in place. Then it gave, the last pieces of glue snapping as he lifted the thin piece of metal from the floor.

He looked down into the maze of tubing that the tile had been covering. He knew what most of it was, and the important systems were hidden in the tattoos on his body. The contents of the tubes didn’t matter right now. He just needed to be able to slip past them.

Beneath the area where the infuser was supposed to be was a gap that led to the bottom of the shaft. The gap was just large enough to fit Drift’s body. Once he was traveling underneath the cells this way, it would be a tight squeeze.

Drift grabbed a particularly sharp piece of pilfered metal and clamped it between his teeth. Regretfully, he unsheathed his Great Sword and hung it on its place on the wall. It would only slow him down in there. Wing would understand. Hopefully Primus would too.

“I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” Drift told Pipes, the words muffled through the metal in his mouth as he eased himself down into the air circulation shaft.

“What if a guard comes by?” Pipes whispered.

Drift shrugged. “Then it’s over. Pretend you were asleep the whole time and you should be okay.”

Pipes’s optics widened, and Drift eased himself the rest of the way into the shaft before he could get out a further response.

Drift switched his vision to low-light mode, but there wasn’t much to see anyway. There was just the maze of tubes above him, some breaking off and leading into cells or onto the other levels of the ship, and the tunnel-like shaft that faded into darkness in both directions.

It was slow going. Drift was practically sliding along the floor to keep his body under the tubes. Eventually, though, he reached a T in the shaft and took a left. Five minutes had already passed. Whether Drift got caught or not, Pipes wasn’t going to be happy when got back.

After another minute, Drift looked up at the tubing above him. He was right under solitary confinement cell 003—Rodimus’s cell, if Prowl’s intel from when Drift had met with him the day before was correct. There was an energon line running up to it, but unlike the regular cells, the flooring around it was flush with the rest of the cell, no tiles to be seen.

Drift disconnected the infuser. Then he knocked on the floor above him, five quick taps. They hadn’t planned this. He could only hope that Rodimus could hear him.

For a moment, there was no response. Drift had raised his hand to knock again when he heard the telltale sounds of someone sitting up on a berth. Drift jammed the blunt end of the piece of metal he’d brought into the hole where the pipe to the infuser had previously been. Not enough to damage it, just to move it a little and hopefully hint to Rodimus that he should lift it. It was too heavy for Drift to manage, since all he had to work with was a hole smaller than his fist.

“Rodimus!” He wasn’t sure how the noise would carry, but figured that if he could hear that it was Drift and not, like, an assassin or a ghost, maybe he would move the infuser.

Finally, there was a scraping noise and then the hole in the floor of the cell was uncovered, exposing Drift to the low recharge-hours lighting and the side of Rodimus’s face.

“Hi,” Drift said, knowing that Rodimus could likely only see a fraction of Drift’s face.

“Hi.” Rodimus was smiling when he turned toward Drift, and that alone made all this—the pain, the risk—feel worth it. The emotion was fleeting, though, as he thought of what he had to say next.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” he began. “I need to get back to my cell before the guard walkthrough. But you need to have these.” Drift passed Rodimus first the piece of metal that he’d used on the connective glue in the floor and then a slim metal card, unmarked, that Prowl had assured him would give its holder access to the emergency hatch in the Medibay.

“But—how?” Rodimus asked, for once at a loss for words.

“I traded with Prowl. Not a big deal. But you have to listen. There’s no way I can break you out of here. Besides the door, this is the only way in.” The nature of their conversation made it clear that this wasn’t a viable alternative. “So you’re going to need to be in the Medibay already.”

“But how are you going to get there? I thought we needed the opening in the workshop.”

“I have a way,” Drift said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m sorry that it has to be this way, but…right before the recharge cycle ends, you need to slit your wrist cables with this.” Drift did his best to point to the shard Rodimus held. “It won’t be life-threatening, but it has to be something beyond what your self-repair can handle.”

Rodimus nodded. “No problem,” he said, something in his voice that Drift identified as either bravado or conviction.

For a moment, he was flooded with respect for his captain. Rodimus trusted Drift, even with this frankly insane version of the plan. But…“There’s one more thing.”

“What is it?”

Drift curled two fingers over the lip of the gap in the floor mostly to hide his face from Rodimus’s searching gaze. “If we want any kind of head start, I’m going to have to take out Ratchet.”

“What do you mean take out?” Rodimus’s voice was guarded now.

“I mean probably kill. All I have to my name is a sword. It’s not exactly a stun gun.”

Rodimus was silent for a moment. “So it’s his life or mine.”

Drift hadn’t thought about it that way, but “Yes.”

“No.”

“But—”

“No. Find another way.”

“There is no other way! Do you think I would be suggesting this if there was?”

“I’d rather be executed.”

“But you’re innocent!”

“So is Ratchet!”

Their argument had gotten way too loud, so Drift took a moment to vent before replying. “That was my last play. I don’t have another way to help you.”

“Drift.” Rodimus brushed his fingers on top of the two that Drift still had curled onto the floor of the cell. He didn’t say anything else.

“It can’t end like this. It’s not supposed to.” Drift knew that some of his distress was leaking through into his voice. This was it. Nothing else mattered, and nothing else would matter ever again.

“I wish that things really worked that way, too,” Rodimus said softly. He picked up his fingers, leaving Drift’s cold. Then the access card and piece of sharp warped metal were pushed back into his hand. “Get back to your cell. The guards are probably doing their rounds soon.”

“Okay,” Drift whispered. He started to crawl back towards his own cell. His optics burned, and he wished he’d followed his instinct and ended the exchange with _Okay, Captain._

\--

“I’d like to speak with the warden,” Drift said to the guard at the door as the first shift of workers was led out of their cells.

The guard laughed hard enough to draw the attention of several of the guards and inmates around them. “Yeah, and I’d like to have a word with Primus himself, but sometimes we just can’t get what we want.”

Drift did his best to ignore all of that. “It’s regarding Rodimus of Nyon’s execution.”

The guard, as expected, sobered at that. “What do you want from him?”

“Permission to be in the audience. Rodimus is…a friend.” Drift wasn’t totally sure that _friend_ was the right word. They’d barely had a conversation before they had started planning the Lost Light voyage, and Drift wasn’t sure that Rodimus would count him as a friend even now. They still barely knew each other. But the situation that they’d been put in had kind of eclipsed any traditional definition of friendship all the same.

“I’ll speak to my supervisor,” the guard said, now totally subdued and looking almost ashamed. _Guess that’s what happens when they remember that we’re people._

Drift did the morning’s work in a daze. He sat at one of the corner stations out of habit, but determinedly kept his eyes from straying toward the spot on the floor where he and Rodimus had melted away the glue surrounding a tile just a few days previous.

“Drift of Rodion!” The guard’s sharp voice knocked Drift badly off-kilter, and the plate he’d just finished making clattered to the floor. He picked it up and set it in the proper pile, then stood and looked at the guard. The guard nodded toward the door, and Drift crossed the room to walk through it.

“Arms out.” A different guard stood in the hallway, already holding a pair of cuffs at the ready. Drift complied with the order, not complaining as his wrists were unceremoniously strapped together. The guard led him to the elevator up to the cell block, through a hallway between rows of cells, up the second elevator that led to the track, then through a pair of locked doors, one of which had a bored-looking guard posted to it. The part of the ship that had once been a staging area for the stadium fights was on the other side, and it looked to have been turned into some kind of psychiatric wing for the prison. There were cells with full doors instead of bars, a room with some basic medical equipment, a much higher guard-to-prisoner ratio than the main wing, and strangely subdued inmates. Drift’s suspicions solidified when he saw Rung himself walk from one room to another, carrying a stack of datapads.

They walked through the area quickly, and reached another set of double-locked doors that led to a staircase. The guard led Drift up it and swiped them into a hallway that looked like it could very well be on another ship. The floor here was polished and the walls were a soft blue instead of the industrial grays and browns that dominated everywhere else. There was an airlock in the hallway ceiling, installed for the purposes of getting the crew out if their captives ever escaped, but right now it functioned as a simple skylight. It cast sunlight onto Drift for a few steps of the walk down the hallway. The emergency hatch in the Medibay had a window in it, but it was angled towards the ground, not offering much of a view unless one was fascinated by dirt and dunes. There were no other windows on the parts of the ship where prisoners were allowed. The prisoners couldn’t see New Iacon, only a few miles away across a plain, and New Iacon couldn’t see the prisoners. Drift had practically forgotten that sunlight even existed.

The guard knocked on a door, waited for acknowledgement from inside, and then swiped his access card to unlock it. He held it open, gesturing for Drift to step inside. Drift thought about asking if the cuffs could be taken off first, but was sure enough that the answer was no that he decided not to bother.

“Drift.” Bumblebee was sitting behind a gigantic desk. Like the hallway outside, the desk could have come from an office building. It was smooth and polished, and ornate. There was a stack of datapads off to one side, but little other clutter. It was clear that Bumblebee, serving as the Autobot ambassador to the provisional government as well as prison warden, wasn’t spending much time here.

“Bee.” Drift wasn’t sure how the nickname would go over, considering that he was standing and cuffed with the black stripe marking him as a prisoner standing out on his chest, and Bumblebee was seated and cuffless and had what might as well be all the power in the galaxy in comparison.

Bee smiled at it, just a twitch at one corner of his lip. The expression disappeared after a fraction of a second, but it made Drift angry. Bumblebee shouldn’t get to smile. Not in the midst of what was happening to Rodimus.

“I hear you want to petition to sit in at the execution,” Bumblebee said, face impassive now, hands resting palm-down on the desk. “May I ask why?”

Drift had prepared for this. “Rodimus is a friend,” he said, more sure of himself this time. “If this has to happen…I want to be there. I want to meet his eyes one last time. Just for…closure.” He did his best to keep the bitterness out of his voice at the last word.

Bumblebee nodded, and grabbed a datapad with one hand. Drift waited, anxious, as he typed something into it. After what seemed like an age, Bumblebee looked up.

“I’ve granted your request,” he said. “But I do have one more question.”

“And what question is that?”

“Do you believe that he killed Metalhawk?”

This was unexpected. Drift floundered for a response, eventually settling on “No.” His voice was soft, reflecting his indecision. It wouldn’t do to have his opinions on Bumblebee’s radar.

But it wasn’t like he had anything left to lose.

Bumblebee met Drift’s optics, and neither spoke for an achingly long moment. “I’m hoping you’re right,” Bumblebee said eventually. “Perhaps the execution will provide closure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may notice that this is now a series. :o The other fic is When Thunder Roars, a companion to Into the Light starring Chromedome, Rewind, and Prowl. Chapters will be posted concurrently with ITL chapters as events move forward. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	6. Chapter 6

The viewing space outside the execution area was cold, and there were no windows anywhere. Drift was still inside the prison, in a basement room off the engines that was meant to securely store extra fuel during long missions. The room was on its own air circulation, fireproof, and soundproof. An appropriate place for a procedure where someone was likely to scream. It had been divided into two sections with a transparent wall between the execution room and the viewing area. There was an empty chair with open manacles on the arms and front legs on the other side of the wall.

When a guard had led Drift in, only Bumblebee, Ratchet, and three other guards had been present. Bumblebee had gestured to the guard leading Drift and then pointed at the cuffs around Drift’s wrists. The guard had unlocked them, freeing Drift to move about the evil little room as he liked, but Bumblebee leveled a serious look on him, letting him know that having the cuffs off was a privilege, one granted out of the kindness of Bumblebee’s spark and one that Drift could lose.

Ratchet, for his part, didn’t look thrilled to be there. Before Drift could even meet his eyes, though, a guard opened a door at the other side of the room and called for him. Through the door, Drift could see a flash of red plating. Ratchet followed the order, his back to Drift, and the door shut behind him.

Instead of risking eye contact with Bumblebee or any of the guards, Drift stared at the chair on the other side of the room. His mind was strangely blank, as if his thoughts had been replaced by static. Distantly, he thought about prayer. Times like these were what prayer was for, right? But if Primus was going to help, he already would have. Drift shouldn’t have to resort to begging when he was just trying to do Primus’s bidding already.

He’d known that his path would be hard. But he had never really thought that he’d fail.

Not until now.

Soon enough, a door was opened in the wall on the other side of the translucent barrier. Rodimus exited first, head held high and haughty even though his optics were narrow with grief. A pair of guards followed, then Ratchet, who barely stepped foot into the room, lurking near the door with a glower.

Under the guards’ watchful eyes, Rodimus sat gingerly in the chair. The guards descended on him, locking the manacles with disturbingly skilled, practiced movements. Rodimus’s eyes met Drift’s as Bumblebee stepped up to a pattern of small holes in the transparent wall that looked like they were meant for communication between sides of the room. The Neutral representative who had replaced Metalhawk stood tall and silent beside him.

“Rodimus of Nyon, you have been sentenced to death for the murder of the neutral Cybertronian Metalhawk,” Bumblebee said. “Your sentence is to be carried out now. Do you have any last words?”

“I didn’t do it,” Rodimus said. “I didn’t kill him. I liked him! All of you who aren’t doing the lying are being lied to. Remember that.” Rodimus’s voice cracked on the last word. He turned his optics toward the ceiling and Drift could no longer see his expression.

Drift shut his own optics and prayed.

“Guard, begin the—”

“ _Stop!_ ”

Drift snapped his optics wide open. That had sounded like—but it couldn’t be—

It was. Ultra Magnus was standing in the doorway, trailed by a confused-looking guard. “These proceedings are illegal under Provision 687 of the Tyrest Accord.”

Drift looked up at Ultra Magnus, who paid him no attention. His optics were fixed on Bumblebee, and he looked…stern, as always, but underneath, Drift could see fear. He supposed that one who wasn’t looking for it wouldn’t notice.

Drift wondered what Magnus would say next. They had only met about this once, the day after Rodimus’s original execution date had been set, and at the time Drift had implored Magnus to find a way to turn this around. Magnus had insisted that he couldn’t. That even though the evidence was so obviously faked, it was still _there_. Magnus had been frustrated, though. Drift had gotten the impression that the laws he had sworn to obey were being followed practically to the letter, even though the ends for which they were being used were far from the laws’ intent. That had helped Drift convince Magnus to leave on the Lost Light with him and Rodimus as planned. He’d never agreed to help with the prison break, though. Drift suspected that the trial had been legal enough that he couldn’t justify that level of intervention, at least, not when he was the one doing it. Drift had judged him for it, back then. Back before he’d gotten this desperate.

But here Ultra Magnus was.

“A trial has taken place according to your customs as Bumblebee described them,” the Neutral representative argued.

“Bumblebee was referring to a section of the Accord that only applies under the condition that the deceased belongs to a society with an official functioning government,” Ultra Magnus said. Drift looked at Rodimus, who was watching the proceedings in shock, with wide optics and his jaw hanging. Rodimus was looking at Ultra Magnus like he was Primus himself, come to wave his magic wand and save Rodimus’s life.

And maybe Primus had.

Drift’s optics strayed to Ratchet, still hunkered in the corner of the room. He was watching the proceedings with a keen expression. By now there was the ghost of a smile on his face, only visible if one compared it to the blankness of before. Ratchet seemed to notice Drift’s lingering gaze. He met Drift’s optics, acknowledging him with a barely perceptible nod.

“The trial that took place was thus not in compliance with the law laid out in the Tyrest Accord,” Ultra Magnus finished. Drift refocused on the main event in the room—the staring contest between Magnus and Bumblebee. He realized abruptly that Magnus had had to talk for so long because his argument was actually rather weak. It was obvious who Metalhawk’s people were, and it was obvious what they wanted. By arguing that the neutrals lacked an official governing body, which was true, Magnus was insisting that Rodimus be tried as someone who had killed a stateless noncombatant. Instead of a trial by the government of the civilian killed, Rodimus would be subject to a military trial by the Autobots.

It was a weak argument. But it was obviously the best that Magnus could come up with. He was putting himself and his reputation on the line for this. There wasn’t even any chance that it would prove Rodimus’s innocence—the Autobots were in on this, and Drift had his suspicions that it had been their idea in the first place. All Magnus’s interference would do was buy Drift time.

Drift promised himself that he would make it worth it.

“I defer to your knowledge of the Accord,” Bumblebee said, still staring at Magnus and not sounding happy about his decision. Bumblebee finally broke his gaze off from Magnus and turned to the Neutral who was openly frowning next to him. “A trial will be scheduled promptly. But we must comply with our laws.”

Rodimus turned his head to the ceiling again. Drift could see him blinking, over and over, as if to convince himself that all of this was real. Drift’s optics slid back to Ratchet, who was studying Drift. Uncomfortable at the scrutiny, he shifted his gaze to Magnus, who was now observing impassively as the guards unlocked the manacles around Rodimus’s limbs. _They still had time._

\--

Drift felt like he as floating for the whole of the next day. His leg barely ached where Arcee had injured it. His limbs felt light enough that he thought he could probably fly if he so desired.

But none of that meant that there wasn’t still work to do.

Drift met Rodimus’s eyes as the morning shift filed into the workshops and gave Rodimus a nod to let him know that the plan was still on. They’d barely made a dent in the metal floor that they had to cut through during the one shift they’d worked on it, but Drift was sure that they could make it at least halfway today.

As luck would have it, the workshop was down one guard today. One was posted to the door, and there was only one circling the room instead of the usual two. Pipes, as instructed, was chatting cheerfully to the bots next to him, occasionally stepping into a topic that escalated into an argument intense enough to draw the guards over to that corner of the room. Drift hadn’t thought that the strategy would work quite as well as it did. Tailgate in particular seemed to rise to Pipes’ bait easily. The poor kid had some _stupid_ opinions, which tended to annoy the bots surrounding him. Net, without fail, Cyclonus would snarl at someone seemingly unprovoked, but always tangentially in Tailgate’s defense. It was the perfect storm of tension that kept the guards’ attention far from Drift and Rodimus.

As one of them watched the room, the other would point the laser saw Drift had wired from the soldering equipment at the floor. It made a jagged line from the corner to the space between the desks, then a straighter line that eventually reached back to the wall. The laser saw melted away the connective glue between the wall and the floor so easily that Drift had to stop Rodimus before he cut it all away and made the grate fall into the air circulation shaft below.

“We can do the rest with our hands,” Drift whispered, soldering a plate of metal at the same time. They were both behind on their quotas, but there was an hour left in the shift and they were _done_.

“So is that everything?” Rodimus asked as he worked to fill his pile at record speed. The near-death experience had seemed to turn him giddy rather than subdue him, but it was a nervous sort of giddy. Drift had noticed Rodimus’s hands shaking when he wasn’t holding something, and his optics never seemed to stay still, either scanning the room for potential threats or just jumping from thought to thought to stay comfortable.

“That’s all,” Drift said, trying to infuse calm into his voice even though all he was feeling was excitement. “If you and Rewind can get out of your cell, we’ll leave tomorrow night.”

“Not tonight?”

“You might need more time than that. Especially if you’re careful.” Drift should probably speak to Rewind to make sure that happened—‘careful’ was not Rodimus’s forte.

Rodimus looked up at Drift, optics shining with some combination of joy and leftover worry. “I guess I’m going to need those tools back.”

Drift nodded. “I’ll bring them to track today.”

Rodimus arranged another chuck of metal in the soldering machine and pressed down on it. “So after all this” he gestured to indicate the grounded prison ship around them and, presumably, all the preparations that they had been making in it. “What happens next?”

“We’ll probably be missed after an hour,” Drift said. “That should be enough time to drive over to the Lost Light. Magnus will have it ready and waiting to launch. If they have someone guarding it, we fight them. And we get out.”

“What about the people who would have come with us?” Rodimus asked. “You said that we would have a whole crew.”

Drift turned his optics down toward his work. “Unless you have another idea, we’ll have to pick them up along the way.”

“Okay,” Rodimus said. “We can do that. We’ll figure it out.”

\--

Drift walked ahead of the guard that was leading him back to the cell block, pleased with life. He’d just had his second-to-last visit with Ratchet, who had been kind enough not to mention the debacle with Rodimus’s execution and kept the visit light, telling Drift a story about another patient who had tried to stab one of the nurses that morning. He’d left Drift with a long, serious look. It told Drift that Ratchet knew something was up, even if he was above pestering Drift about it.

It was ridiculous, but it was Ratchet that kept coming to mind when Drift thought about getting out that exit hatch, to the Lost Light, and off the planet for the foreseeable future. Drift had had nothing when he’d been placed in here. He had lost the Autobots’ trust, his informal position in their command structure, everything that it had taken for him to get in here with the tools and information that he needed. He’d been on the verge of losing Rodimus and consequently his dream of fulfilling the vision. He’d been able to hold onto the last two by his fingertips alone, these past few weeks, but he was surprised to find that it seemed he’d gained something. Ratchet’s…friendship wasn’t appropriate. He was Ratchet’s patient. But Ratchet was always so steady and…not kind, necessarily, but even Ratchet’s barbs about Drift’s faith and accident-prone tendencies made Drift feel more real, more alive, than anyone else here had. It was around Ratchet alone that Drift had able to relax even a little since he’d gotten here. He talked to Drift like a person when the guards and even Bumblebee treated him like a piece of dirt.

_I would have gone with you_. And Ratchet was honest. That was another thing that had been lacking in Drift’s life lately. He wished that they could take Ratchet with them. But he’d more likely freak out and tell Bumblebee about Drift’s plan than go along with it.

This whole mission was about sacrifice. A tentative friendship was nothing compared to what had been lost already. And the clock was counting down to when it would all become worth it.

Drift’s cell was on a curve in the hallway, five cells down from the nearest exit. They were coming from the far exit, past rows of variably rowdy inmates. But as they approached Drift’s cell, something tingled against Drift’s awareness.

The inmates around here were too quiet. Usually there was someone yelling at someone across the aisle, someone singing and everyone else screaming at them to shut the frag up, general conversation. The reason for the absence of noise became apparent as they rounded the last curve.

There was a body lying in the hallway outside Drift’s cell. More bodies were strewn down the hallway nearby. A giant hole marred the wall where the controls for the first several cells had once been.

Drift turned to the guard who had been walking with him, holding up his cuffed hands, and doing his best to implore him to unlock Drift’s cuffs. _Please,_ he thought, channeling it into his optics, his aura. _Whoever did this could still be around. You need me_. Drift may have been a prisoner, but he had no track record of violence in here. And he had his sword. If whatever had done this was still around, Drift and this guard could be allies in fighting it.

The guard stood still for a moment, and Drift stared him down. _Please. For both of us_. Then the guard reached into a compartment, grabbed his keys, and unlocked the cuffs. He didn’t say anything as he drew his blaster and continued down the hallway. Drift drew his sword and followed.

Drift felt the vibrations from the threat before he saw him. There was someone huge, taking one step, then another.

Overlord stepped out of Drift’s cell, stooping to keep his head from going through the ceiling.

Drift grabbed the guard’s keys and used his swipe card to open the supply closet next to them in the hallway. The door slid open silently and Overlord wasn’t looking their way as Drift herded the guard inside, instinctively putting himself between the guard and the hallway.

Overlord took a step towards them. Drift closed the closet door, hoping that Overlord wouldn’t notice.

He didn’t, but Drift kept himself completely still, not even venting as Overlord continued down the hallway. He didn’t seem interested in getting into any other cells. Too easy? Too time-consuming? Or maybe they just weren’t his targets. The prisoners locked inside these cells weren’t the ones who had imprisoned Overlord, after all. The first grouping of cells had probably just been a convenient target for his anger.

There was a crash at the end of the hallway—the door that Drift and his guard had walked in through. The door to the lift down to the lower level of the ship. Wrong way, if your target was the people in charge. But Overlord wouldn’t know that.

As soon as he heard Overlord crash through the door on the lower level, Drift flung the closet door open and ran, ignoring the protests of the guard. Overlord was long gone. But the prisoners he’d attacked—Pipes—

Drift skidded to a stop right outside his cell. _No_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :o
> 
> This chapter is not accompanied by a chapter of WTR, but every subsequent chapter will be!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The 'Graphic Descriptions of Violence' warning is especially relevant to this chapter.

Drift sat frozen on his berth, the only part of the room that wasn’t conspicuously splattered with Pipes’ energon. His cellmate’s greyed-out body was prone on the floor, dead before Drift had been able to reach him. Drift couldn’t quite tell, but he was pretty sure that Pipes had transformed, tried to flee, and then been stepped on. Maybe more than once.

Drift wasn’t sure how much time passed. He sat there until he heard the door at the end of the hall clang open. Drift drew his sword and centered himself into a battle stance without conscious thought.

But there was no need. It was just a few guards, running through the hallway from one elevator to another. “He’s tearing through the lower level, looking for an exit. Blast door’s up, but it’s not long before he gets through to the Medibay!” one was shouting into a comm.

The Medibay. That brought Drift back to alertness. Ratchet would be there. Ratchet was in Overlord’s way. And Drift had a way to get him out.

He sheathed his sword and ran after the guards, who had already clanged shut the door at the other end of the hallway. He skidded to a stop outside Rodimus’s cell. “I need the digging tool back,” he said without preamble.

Rodimus and Rewind, who were both seated against the back wall, startled at the sight of him. “What? Why? How did you get out of your cell?” Rodimus asked, even as he reached into a compartment to comply with Drift’s request.

“No time for that now. Stay safe. Can you get into the tunnel under your cell?” Drift pitched his voice to a whisper so that only Rodimus and Rewind could hear him.

“Yeah, but I’m not going to hide myself away when all the other prisoners are in danger,” Rodimus replied, clapping the tool into Drift’s hand. With it was the access card, which Drift didn’t actually need, but he didn’t have time for the argument that would ensue if he tried to turn it down. “Good luck.”

Drift wanted to argue, but he didn’t. Rodimus’s noble streak emerged at odd times, but it was a part of Rodimus all the same. It was one of the things that made him the person Drift had decided to save.

“Thanks,” he said instead. He didn’t wait for a reply before dashing back toward his own cell. Once there, he used the lever he’d made from another piece of scrap metal to pry open the loose tile. He dropped into the tunnel underneath, taking only a second to put the tile back in place. Covering the hole perfectly would use up all-too-precious seconds. This would have to be good enough.

Drift had done a practice run through of this route once before. He made it to the hatch in the ceiling at the top of the workshops quickly, and set about unscrewing the nails that kept it in place—tricky work, when the only screwdriver he had doubled as a sword. He’d done this a few times already, trying to find the fastest way out while leaving the grate looking normal during the day, and leaving the screws slightly loosened had been the best plan he’d managed to come up with. Unscrewing them the rest of the way only took a few minutes, but with every second that passed, Drift’s brain was coming up with new horrible ways that Overlord could be killing Ratchet right now, and he knew that he really was running out of time.

Eventually, the hatch came loose and Drift carefully lifted it, placing it inside the tunnel. He jumped down to the floor of the workshop. This time, there was no way to pretend that he hadn’t been here. He just had to hope that he’d make it back before anyone noticed the missing hatch.

The escape felt something like a fantasy at the moment, though. Drift had more pressing worries.

It took another agonizing minute of hacking with Rodimus’s tool to clear the rest of the glue away from the tile in the corner. The tile fell into the circulation shaft below with a clatter. Drift winced at the noise, but nobody was around. Anyone who might have noticed it had more pressing worries right now, too.

This part of the route was new but straightforward. According to his plans, Drift just had to crawl through the tunnel in the direction that he’d come from. The path should lead straight to the ventilation hatch in the Medibay.

Primus, if Ratchet died, the last thing Drift would have told him would be a lie. Everything Ratchet knew about him would be a lie. Drift hadn’t realized until now just how much he’d like to see that changed.

He almost didn’t recognize the Medibay when he reached it. It was darker than he’d ever seen it, but he realized that that must be because of the blast door that the guard had mentioned and the associated disaster protocols. It didn’t look like Overlord had been in here.

“Ratchet?” Drift called. There was a crash from the other side of the room and then footsteps. Ratchet appeared on the other side of the grate, snarling, with a blaster leveled at Drift’s face.

He lifted it away, though, when he saw Drift. “What are you doing here?”

“Getting you out of here. But I need you to stand back.” The hatch in the Medibay was reinforced, probably in case someone tried to do exactly what Drift was doing now. He might be blowing the escape by calling security’s attention to the weakness in the ship’s design. But this was life or death. Everything beyond that didn’t matter.

Ratchet gave him a burning look, but he and the blaster both disappeared. Drift set to work.

First, he used the tool that he’d gotten from Rodimus to nick one of the main energon lines in his wrist. The resemblance between his action and Arcee’s attack wasn’t lost on him, but he put it out of his mind and concentrated on smearing the area just outside of the grate with energon.

It wasn’t easy to get his sword out of its sheath in the confined space, but he managed it just as a thundering crash came from the Medibay. A fist the size of Drift’s entire body against the blast door, most likely.

Drift backed away as much as he could, lined up the sword, and scraped it against the metal of the shaft, making a trail of sparks right through the line of smeared energon. The explosion was immediate and overwhelming. Drift shuttered his optics through the worst of the scorching blast. There was a moment when he feared he may have miscalculated, and that he might die right here. But the moment passed and the air cleared, and when he dared open his optics, the grate was gone, just pieces of warped and blackened metal on the bottom of the shaft.

Drift allowed himself a moment for a satisfied grin. His calculations had been right.

Normal active energon wasn’t that explosive. At the early stages of the plan, Drift had considered trying to find Engex in the prison—maybe he could bribe a guard to sneak it in for him, maybe he could find an inmate that had somehow set up a homebrewing system. But he’d dismissed that idea as having too many variables. Then, by luck alone, he’d run into Cyprus’s research. The neutral had created a treatment for addiction whose main downside was that it made one’s active energon flammable. Explosive, even.

That treatment was what allowed him to climb up, sword-first, into the Medibay. “Come with me,” he said to Ratchet, who was staring at Drift as though Drift was a hallucination. “I can get you to safety.”

But Ratchet didn’t even have time to respond before a giant fist finally made its way through the blast door. Drift stood up from the grate and took his sword in hand. He pointed back at the grate with the other. “Go into the ship, and you’ll hit an opening in the workshop,” he said as Overlord’s face emerged through the hole that he was now rapidly tearing through the blast door.

“I’m not leaving you here alone,” Ratchet growled. His blaster was leveled towards Overlord, who now almost had a hole large enough to fit himself through.

“My faith will protect me,” Drift said.

“Maybe it will,” Ratchet replied. “But we do this together.” Into his comm, he said, “He’s through.”

And then there was no more time for words. Overlord was stomping towards Ratchet, and Drift leapt in his direction, aiming his sword for the cables and nervecircuits in his knees. He wasn’t under any illusions that he would be able to kill Overlord. But maybe he could disable him enough to save their lives. Maybe he could slow him down long enough for help to arrive. The world had shrunk to exclude all but the next few seconds.

Overlord reached down to swat at Drift, who managed to duck out of the way, but his strike suffered for it. Instead of the deep cut into the gap in Overlord’s armor that he’d been aiming for, his sword glanced off the armor itself with such intensity that Drift nearly lost his grip on it. He stumbled as he landed on the Medibay floor.

Ratchet was firing his blaster methodically, aiming for Overlord’s optics. He’d taken a pathetic sort of cover behind one of the medical berths, but Drift could already tell that it wouldn’t last. He examined the scene, trying to figure out a way to bring Overlord’s optics into Ratchet’s line of fire. Or rather, make him look down.

Drift waited a few seconds for an opening, and then leapt forward to strike Overlord through the ankle, where plating didn’t completely cover the circuitry underneath.

The got Overlord’s attention. He looked down at Drift, who was now holding his sword defensively above his head. Ratchet was still firing at Overlord’s optics. After several agonizing seconds, he landed a shot. Overlord’s right optic fritzed, sparked, and finally died. Overlord reacted before Ratchet could get even one more shot off. He used the foot Drift had stabbed to fling Drift to the other side of the room, where he crashed against the wall. In practically the same second, he used one enormous hand to tear the berth that Ratchet had been using for cover out of the Medibay floor. It clattered away and came to rest on its back. With the other hand, he grabbed Ratchet around the neck and lifted him into the air.

None of this even seemed to faze Ratchet, who leveled his gun at Overlord’s one functional optic and fired. He was at a bad angle, though, and the shot glanced harmlessly off Overlord’s audial.

Drift stood, ignoring the damage reports that his HUD kept sending, and launched himself at Overlord again.

Overlord was ready, though. Drift’s strike towards his knee didn’t even touch his body this time. Overlord grabbed his sword by the blade in midair, and it was all that Drift could do to hold on to it.

Overlord looked at him again, face distorted into a hideous smile. Drift had to dig deep into half-forgotten Decepticon instincts to keep hold of his gaze.

Then Ratchet screamed, and Drift’s optics were torn towards that. Overlord was crushing his neck in one gigantic fist. Ratchet dropped the blaster.

Drift, desperate, swung his body around the hilt of his sword to kick at Overlord’s wrist cabling. He knew that he had no hope whatsoever of hurting him like that. But he hoped that the action would be enough to annoy him.

It was. Overlord hissed and looked over at Drift. Then he looked back at Ratchet and seemed to make a decision. He lifted Ratchet slightly higher in the air, and Drift assumed that he meant to throw him to the floor, until he spotted the upturned leg of the berth that Overlord had torn out of the floor. Overlord slammed Ratchet into it before Drift could even cry out in protest.

He impaled Ratchet through the midsection, luckily. Far from his spark. Drift doubted that the show of mercy had been intentional.  All he had to do now was keep Overlord’s attention until help arrived.

If help arrived. Security should have gotten here already. Had the prison administration left Ratchet for dead?

“I like this,” Overlord said, bouncing his hand to indicate the sword that he still held by the blade. Drift, still holding on to the hilt with one hand, bounced with it. “Let go.”

“Never,” Drift promised. The sword was a part of him. It was in the scripture, and it held significance for Drift beyond that. It had been Wing’s, and it represented so much. He wasn’t going to let go and let Overlord use it to hurt innocent people.

“You’ll regret saying that,” Overlord said mildly in his deep voice. “I would know.” And with no further ado, he started pulling at one of Drift’s legs with his thumb and forefinger.

Drift had made his decision. His grip on the sword remained fast.

The pull was excruciating, but Drift had had worse. Drift kept his optics determinedly on Overlord’s as his leg popped out of its socket.

“Drift! Let go of the sword!” Ratchet’s voice was soft, scratchy and nearly unrecognizable. Overlord had definitely damaged his voxcoder.

Drift didn’t. Overlord started pulling on his second leg, smiling.

“Drift. I need you down here. Listen!” Ratchet said. Drift realized that among the many warnings on his HUD, most of which were about his injuries and all of which he was ignoring, was an inter-Autobot radio message. From Bumblebee, routed through Ratchet.

Drift kept his optics on Overlord, trying to pretend that nothing had changed as he opened the message.

_Open emergency hatch. Let him out._

Was that some sort of trick? Drift didn’t trust Bumblebee anymore, and this was madness. At least if Overlord was on the ship, he was contained.

But Drift and Ratchet were quickly running out of options. Drift let go of the sword. If there was a way to save Ratchet’s life, sanctioned by Bumblebee for whatever reason, then that was more important than Drift’s pride.

Drift angled his fall so that he landed next to Ratchet. He hit the ground in a burst of pain. Above him, Overlord laughed and turned the sword so that he was holding it by the hilt.

Ratchet was already holding his access card out in one energon-covered hand. Drift took it and started crawling on his elbows toward the exit hatch. Overlord seemed to have paused, looking curiously down at Drift.

He was only a few feet away from the exit hatch when Overlord brought the sword down so that the tip of it just pierced Drift’s back plating. Drift stopped moving. “Thank you,” Overlord said. Drift didn’t waste the energy it would have taken to look up at him. His optics were fixated on the hatch in front of him, the control pad with its steady red light just out of arm’s reach. “For the weapon.”

Drift didn’t have to respond, because just then, a blast hit Overlord in the side of the face. It startled him enough that the sword slipped out of Drift’s plating. Drift didn’t hesitate. With a strength he didn’t know he still had, he crawled the last few feet towards the access hatch and—

He would have swiped the card, if it wasn’t broken in two. He vaguely remembered his hand grinding against the ground when Overlord first tried to still his movement. He tried the card anyway. Nothing.

_Primus let Prowl have come through on this one,_ Drift thought. He reached into a compartment and pulled out the access card that Rodimus had given him, back in the cell block what felt like a billion years ago. He swiped it across the pad. The light changed from red to green. The hatch popped open. Looking over, Drift saw Overlord’s foot come down on Ratchet’s blaster. Ratchet pulled his hand out of the way just in time.

“You’re free!” Drift shouted. His voice was wonky, his voxcoder reacting to the rapid loss of fuel.

Luckily—if they’d had any luck today—Overlord didn’t seem to require any more words. Still holding Drift’s Great Sword, he crossed the room in a single step and ducked out the hatch. His head was barely beneath them when he stood on the ground.

He’d taken the bait. Drift could only hope that there was a trap in place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You made it! 
> 
> Accompanying chapter of WTR will be up tomorrow because it takes place slightly later, chronologically. Rewind's POV. :0


	8. Chapter 8

Drift watched a giant fist appear from a source outside of this line of vision and punch Overlord in the face. It caught the giant off-guard, and he staggered into the side of the ship, rattling the room that Drift and Ratchet were in.

“What’s going on?” Ratchet whispered. Drift suspected that the whisper was because it was more dignified than the crackling mess that would have spilled out if Ratchet had tried to speak normally.

“There’s someone else out there,” Drift said. The fist’s owner stepped forward then. It was someone familiar. But Drift could scarcely believe what he was seeing.

How in Primus’s name had Bumblebee gotten Devastator to fight Overlord?

Devastator swiped a foot under Overlord’s legs, tripping him. But Overlord, surprisingly agile, got to his feet before Devastator could do anything else. He used the same momentum to tackle Devastator to the ground, causing reverberations that Drift could feel from the ship. The two struggled and Drift finally got a good look at Devastator’s helm.

It was different than he’d ever seen it before. Instead of the garish green and purple that made up the rest of his body, Devastator’s helm gleamed silver. And his fighting style was different too, Drift realized. His attacks were less powerful and more calculated. He actually bothered to defend himself instead of letting the fact that he was nearly indestructible do it for him.

Overlord managed to get the sword through one of Devastator’s arms, and used the brief distraction to stand and slip away. Devastator bounced to his feet and followed with surprising speed. The limited view out the exit hatch window didn’t allow Drift to see any more of the fight.

Absent the distraction, his own situation hit him all at once. Overlord had torn off his legs and taken his sword, Drift had blown most of his plans for the escape in trying to get to Ratchet, and all of this was his fault.

He should never have offered Prowl his help. He’d wanted to string him along, believing that Drift knew the information that Prowl wanted, and disappear from the planet before he actually had to admit anything. Then Arcee had nearly killed him over it, and the residual fear from that night and the distraction of Rodimus’s rescheduled execution had led him to agree to what Prowl wanted without thinking much of it.

He thought about it now. Prowl’s plan to get secrets out of Overlord had been so bad that he’d gotten imprisoned over it. Chromedeome had had a no-contact order so that Prowl couldn’t get in touch with him despite all that. By agreeing to be Prowl’s middleman, Drift had let his plan move forward. He’d facilitated it. How had he been so _stupid_?

“Drift?”

Drift zeroed in on Ratchet’s struggling voice, seizing the distraction from his spiraling thoughts. He quickly stashed his access card in his sword’s empty sheath and started crawling over to where Ratchet was pinned. He lay on the floor, arms by his sides with the palms turned up towards the ceiling. He looked for all the world like he was position on the floor didn’t bother him. If it weren’t for the energon still leaking from his neck and the table leg stuck through his midsection, he could have been laying on the floor by choice. “Let me get you out of there.”

“No. You need to conserve energy,” Ratchet said.

“I may not be a medic but I know that the longer that table leg stays in you, the longer it’s gonna take to heal properly,” Drift said. He reached Ratchet’s side and examined the connection between the leg and the berth it was attached to. The metal was flush, with no screws or anything that Drift could use to disconnect the leg from the berth. If he had a laser saw and his HUD would stop crowding his vision completely with low energy warnings, maybe, but that wasn’t the situation that he was in.

Ratchet must have noticed his helplessness. “I am a medic, and that makes me qualified to tell you that I’ll be fine,” he said. His optics fell out of focus, then, as if he was reading a message. “They’ve issued a lockdown of the prison,” he reported after a few seconds. “Apparently there was a riot upstairs after the power to the cell block cut out. I think we’re the only ones alive on this level.”

“How long?” Drift asked, too exhausted for full sentences when he knew that Ratchet would understand what he meant.

“Don’t know.” Apparently Ratchet felt the same. They lapsed into silence, Ratchet’s even, rattling vents contrasting with Drift’s smooth, shallow, fast ones. The silence was like a black hole for his mind to bring back all the thoughts from before—Prowl, Chromedome, Overlord, how neither he nor Ratchet would be laying on the floor, injured, in a darkened and locked down Medibay if he hadn’t—

“How are you feeling?” Ratchet’s voice was fuzzy. Drift knew that it was an effect of injury, but he imagined a new layer of gentleness to it. Like he really cared how Drift felt, at a time like this.

Drift opened his mouth to answer with something positive, but found himself closing it and shaking his head. He didn’t want to lie to Ratchet right now. Not when he didn’t have to. There were enough lies in the past—and, probably, the future.

“Hey.” The note of gentleness in Ratchet’s voice was back. Drift was becoming more and more convinced that it was real. “The guards are almost done getting prisoners back in their cells, and then they’ll be down here. We’ll be okay.”

That wasn’t comforting. Now they were in the same situation, but with the assurance that Drift wouldn’t die here, leaking out on the floor. He would have to deal with the consequences of this. His very spark seemed to recoil at the concept. His vents seized and his thoughts raced. Maybe he would die here after all.

And then Ratchet’s hand was on his arm. It was warm, and both of them were sticky with energon. “Count with me, okay?”

Drift’s thoughts ceased completely, and he looked up at Ratchet, astonished. He meant literally just counting, right? Not what Drift associated with those words.

But Ratchet’s were glowing a soft red under their normal blue. Drift responded in kind, changing his eye colors as Ratchet did, in a long sequence meant to soothe negative emotions, before his brain really caught up with what was happening. Ratchet—Doctor religion-is-just-a-crutch Ratchet—was doing a Spectralist meditation.

For Drift.

It helped. It helped Drift feel secure in his body, even with the pain he was in, and showed him that despite all that had happened, all that would happen in the future, right now he was safe. He was hurt, but he wasn’t going to die, and neither was Ratchet. Drift felt so much better after the sequence that he had to shutter his optics a few times to keep them from leaking with relief.

Ratchet’s hand kept contact with Drift’s forearm the whole time, all the way up until guards burst their way into the Medibay.

\--

The first thing that hit Drift’s awareness was pain. Mostly in his legs, but radiating out over the rest of his body, too. The rest of his senses gave a more pleasant take on his surroundings. It was warm enough, and he was lying on a berth, and there were other mechs around him—mostly docile, one walking. He must be in a Medibay.

Then he remembered. Overlord. Pipes. Devastator. Ratchet. He shot up in the berth, convinced, for a moment, that the fight still wasn’t over.

“Whoa there,” said an unfamiliar voice from next to him. Drift flinched away from it, struggling to online his optics. His hand met empty air in his attempt to put space between himself and this unknown. He overbalanced, practically slipping off the berth before strong hands caught him and stopped his fall. Ratchet, from his other side, steadied him until he was once again balanced on the berth.

The hands moved from his arm to his shoulders, and Drift relaxed into the contact. His optics finally rebooted, and he opened them to see Ratchet standing over him, frowning worriedly, and a tall bot with a faceplate and no badge looking unhappy at Drift’s side. Behind him, Chromedome lay in the berth next to Drift, seemingly asleep. Drift was surprised but gratified to see him alive.

Drift’s legs had been reattached, and this was definitely the prison Medibay, cleared of debris but still bearing signs of the battle, including the ruined blast door. The hole in the floor that Drift had made of the ventilation hatch was covered with a sheet of metal and surrounded by hazard tape.

“I’ll take over from here, Maven, thanks,” Ratchet said to the other mech, who shrugged and walked away. Ratchet turned his attention to Drift, whose shoulders he still had both hands on. “Will you lie down, please?”

It was the touch of exasperated humor in Ratchet’s voice that led Drift to comply, and maybe also the fact that he was feeling dizzy just from sitting. He let Ratchet ease him down onto the berth. Once he was settled, he finally asked the question. “What happened?”

Ratchet glanced away from Drift’s optics, instead focusing his attention on the plethora of cables that Drift was hooked up to. “Apparently getting locked up wasn’t enough to dissuade Prowl from carrying out the plan that got him arrested in the first place. He was working with Brainstorm and the Duobots to move ahead. Autobot Phase Sixers.” The corners of Ratchet’s mouth curled down with distaste. “He was having Chromedome look inside Overlord’s mind to find out how he’d been created. Overlord, as you may imagine, took offense. He escaped, but Devastator and Rewind managed to get him back into his cell.”

“ _Rewind_?” The last time Drift had seen Rewind, he’d been with Rodimus on the cell block.

Ratchet’s frown deepened. “He was hurt, but we think he’ll pull through. Wheeljack’s finishing the surgery now.”

“Why Wheeljack?”

“Because he’s a doctor.” Ratchet looked at Drift like he intended to check for brain damage.

“I mean, why not you?”

Ratchet was silent for a moment, still fiddling with the medical equipment even though it didn’t really look like he was accomplishing anything. “I had other things to do,” he said. Drift was about to call him out on how completely ridiculous an excuse that was until he continued “I’ve been having problems with my hands. I didn’t trust them for something so delicate. Not when I’d just been operated on myself.”

That silenced Drift. It was humbling, being trusted by Ratchet with something that was clearly personal to him. Drift wondered if that was why Ratchet was here. There had to be some reason that he was working in the prison where he mostly had to deal with routine medication administration and occasionally patching up idiots who’d gotten in fights with each other instead of working more closely with the government.

“Oh,” Drift ended up saying, after wracking his fogged-up brain for absolutely other response. Ratchet wasn’t meeting his eyes anymore, and Drift sensed that a change of subject was his best bet right now. The empty sheath he could feel at his back seemed as good as any. He gestured to it with one hand. “My—“

“Right here,” Ratchet said, motioning to a makeshift hanger behind Drift’s head where his Great Sword hung. It had been cleaned, which was weird, but not bad. He was glad he didn’t have to wash whatever Overlord had done with it off on his own.

_Overlord_. The thought brought Drift back to the present. “Is there a list of the dead?” he asked, keeping his flooding emotions out of his voice.

“Rodimus is fine,” Ratchet said, gently, for the wicked callout that the response was. “You need to rest.”

“My cellmate’s dead,” Drift said. “Overlord got to him while I was here. Well, the first time.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Ratchet said. “Who was he?”

“Pipes. Another Autobot, but I didn’t meet him until we were both in here.” He paused for a second. He didn’t really want to talk about Pipes. “How many?” he asked next.

“Seventeen,” Ratchet said, gruffness masking any emotion that he might have been feeling. “Some from Overlord, some from the riot. They’re still sorting out which is which. Doesn’t make much of a difference to me.”

Drift nodded. He could think of other topics he’d like to talk about—the meditation that Ratchet had walked him through to calm him down, whether the change in he’d seen in Devastator’s color scheme and fighting style had been real, what Ratchet was really doing here at the prison instead of doing the more important things he could be doing for Cybetron, and so much more. Part of him wanted just lie down next to Ratchet, talking about anything that came to mind, for hours. Like during the lockdown, but preferably with neither of them seriously injured. He really, really wanted that.

It was one of the many things that he’d have to give up for the sake of the escape. For the sake of setting off with Rodimus, finding the Knights of Cybertron, and restoring peace to the galaxy. Nothing could get in the way of that.

Ratchet seemed to sense Drift withdrawing. “Get some rest,” he said gently. “Call me over if you need anything.”

Drift couldn’t bet on being able to be friends with Ratchet. But that didn’t mean he had to suppress a small smile at the indication that he cared.

As he felt himself slide back towards sleep, he realized that for all they’d talked about, Ratchet hadn’t once mentioned Drift’s unconventional entrance into the Medibay. He had reason to suspect that Drift was keeping a secret, but he hadn’t called him out on it. He hadn’t even asked how or why he’d gotten there. And that was the kindest thing he could have done.

\--

A few hours later, Drift was being marched back along the cell block. Ratchet had medically cleared him to return to his cell, and hadn’t spoken more to Drift beyond what was professionally necessary. The cell block had been cleared of energon and most other signs of the riot that had apparently taken place, but there were still chunks missing from the walls of the hallway and a number of prisoners conspicuously missing.

“Drift!” Rodimus, seeing him in the hallway, leapt up from his berth and walked up close to the bars.

“Friend of yours?” the guard leading Drift asked.

“Yeah,” Drift said, looking towards Rodimus, who was obviously desperate to talk to him.

The guard looked back and forth between Rodimus, Drift, and the half-destroyed, unusually subdued hallway. “I’ll give you two a moment,” the guard said, walking back a few steps to give them the illusion of privacy but not nearly so far that he wouldn’t be able to hear their conversation.

“Have you seen Rewind?” Rodimus asked.

“No. But Ratchet told me he was in surgery. It sounded like they expect him to pull through. What happened? Ratchet said that he helped get Overlord back in his cell?”

“When the power went out here, he dashed off looking for Chromedome. I guess he put together that he’d been here, doing exactly the thing he reported Prowl for trying to get him to do. Beyond that, I don’t know. I just hope he’s okay.”

“Me too,” Drift agreed on instinct, even though be barely knew Rewind. Rewind had planned to join him and Rodimus on the Lost Light, back when, and that alone gave him a sense of affection for the mech.

Rodimus was still looking at Drift, obviously having a question but not wanting to ask it. Not in front of that guard. “Nothing’s changed,” Drift assured him, putting his uncertainties about the conspicuous signs of his preparations in the workshop and the Medibay aside. Everyone had bigger worries right now—the grate from the workshop’s ceiling, at least, he could put back in place before anyone noticed. The Medibay was another matter, but the whole room had been so destroyed from the battle that hopefully no one would pay attention to the blown-out grate.

That made Ratchet the only remaining problem. Drift would have to figure out a way to deal with that, but for now he was banking on the fact that Ratchet had other worries on his mind. And he did kind of owe Drift his life, a fact that Drift could probably leverage.

He wished that he didn’t have to think about it that way, but honor was a luxury he’d had to give up for this already. “I’ll see you at work, yeah?” Drift said, and Rodimus nodded.

Drift stepped away, and the guard continued to follow him down the hallway. Drift considered thanking him, but decided not to.

Drift was looking forward to getting back to his empty cell and resting, maybe meditating to process everything that had happened and to figure out how to proceed with the escape from here. The Medibay was too full of seriously injured mechs to use it to escape tonight, and probably for the next few days. Drift and Rodimus would have to lay low for now.

Regardless, Drift expected to find an empty cell. He didn’t.

A tall mech, with huge blue claws and a single bright, astute optic stood in the center, arms crossed as if he’d been waiting for Drift. That was bad.

The energon infuser was off to the side, the hole beneath it exposed. That was worse.

Drift kept still, not reacting as the guard nonchalantly swiped his card to open it. He entered without protest and tried to hide the displaced infuser with his body as he reached his hands forward so that the guard could uncuff him.

He felt his shoulders drop as the guard walked away without commenting, and then tensed again as he turned to Whirl.

Whirl spoke before Drift could. “Cyclonus was looking for a place to hide his cellie during the riot, and lo and behold.” He clapped one claw in the direction of the exposed hole in the floor. “I found this, and he thinks I owe him something, so I showed him. Anyway, all three of us want in.”

Before Drift could respond to that, a burst of static came through the speakers, indicating that an announcement was forthcoming. Drift turned his attention to that. After a moment, Bumblebee’s voice filtered through. “Hello prisoners. We apologize for the lack of oversight that led to Overlord harming your fellow inmates. However, we are disappointed with the response from the rest of you during the situation.”

“—load of slag.” Whirl mumbled. Drift ignored him.

“We mourn those, guards and prisoners alike, who lost their lives in the attack. A memorial will be held tomorrow at the track. Details will be disseminated shortly. Lastly, both of these events have caused the administration to make a decision. The escape of a prisoner from this facility was contained in time, this time, but it is now obvious that this facility is a threat to New Iacon. Therefore, the facility is moving.”

Good thing Drift had a few days before they could even attempt to make their escape. He’d have to figure out a new route to the Lost Light. Somehow. He hoped that the ship wasn’t moving, like, all the way across the planet. That would be bad.

“Starting one hour from now, the New Iacon Mobile Penitentiary will be stationed in elliptical orbit around Cybertron.”

That was worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unfortunately my laptop crashed, and I lost my first-pass edits on chapters 8-12 as well as WTR 2-4. I also currently only have computer access at libraries. All of this may or may not impact the update schedule? It might take me a while to catch up to where I was, but also I might just take all day Saturday to plow through it. Thanks for reading!


	9. Chapter 9

Not a second seemed to pass without reminding Drift of his new predicament. Even from the track, he could feel the change: a soft vibration underfoot constantly, sometimes more or less intense depending on how fast the ship had to be going to keep to its elliptical trajectory around Cybertron. The attitude of the prisoners had changed, too, but Drift suspected that that was due more to the attack and riot than the subsequent change of location. Some prisoners were more subdued, lingering at the edges of the track in small groups, talking quietly, but most were rowdier; racing, fighting, and having the guard’s whistles blown on them what seemed like every minute.

The track wasn’t the ideal place for Drift to think, but neither was his cell, anymore, not with Whirl there antagonizing him over his refusal to provide any further details on the escape. He had refused Whirl’s questions because he knew for a fact that Whirl wasn’t going to like the answers.

The only honest answer was that he hadn’t planned for this. He had no idea how to facilitate the escape from space. The exit hatch in the Medibay would still open to his access card, but instead of leading to the surface of the planet and safety, it would lead to cold, empty space that would be almost impossible to navigate. That was, if they even managed to make it outside before the quadruple-redundant emergency alarms gave them away.

For all his allies, all his knowledge, and all his determination to see this through, Drift couldn’t think of a way out of this situation.

He had mulled over the possibility of trying to set in motion a series of events that would lead to the ship being stationed back on the planet’s surface, and had reached the final stages of accepting that such a course wouldn’t work. There was no guarantee that the administration would agree to the move, no matter what the inciting event was, and there was nothing that had a chance of working in the first place.

So he would have to facilitate the escape from space. And he only had the time until Rodimus’s trial, which was in a little less than two weeks and would almost certainly end in his immediate execution.

He was drawn out of his thoughts by a mech entering his space, striding purposefully towards where Drift lurked on the stands from the other side of the track area. Drift let his optics focus in a different direction as Prowl approached.

“Hello, Drift.” Prowl’s voice was oddly subdued. Drift hadn’t given much thought to what he thought he’d seen outside the Medibay window after the fight with Overlord. He’d filed it away as a pain-addled illusion, not possibly real. He pulled the memory out now, and examined it. It was Prowl’s coloring at Devastator’s helm, and Prowl’s fighting style that Devastator had displayed.

And it was Prowl standing before him now, plating battered, optics downcast.

Drift didn’t know how, but at that moment he knew in his spark that Prowl had been at Devastator’s helm yesterday. He didn’t know why Prowl had put himself in that position—

On second thought, he wasn’t sure that Prowl _had_. Maybe the Devastator thing hadn’t been his doing at all. He certainly didn’t look like a person whose dreams had all come true.

Drift decided to reserve judgement, for now, and focus on the immediate problem: getting Prowl to leave so that he could focus on planning the breakout. “What do you want?”

“I want to leave Cybertron with you.”

“And why in Primus’s domain should I agree to that?”

Prowl looked away, frowning. “Name your price.”

“There is no price.” Well, Drift had never thought about it that way before, at least. Pipes had been—and Rewind was—included by default, and Whirl, Cyclonus, and Tailgate had essentially forced their way in through blackmail.

“I have contacts. Contacts who can facilitate your…egress,” Prowl said.

“So just escape on your own. Why jump in on my plan? I have what I need from you. You got what you needed from me—though I don’t think you so cruel as to imagine you’re happy about it.”

“The situation on Cybertron has become…untenable for me. I need to get out quickly and quietly.”

“So you want to exercise your control fantasies over my crew,” Drift said emotionlessly. “No. Get away from me.”

“Please.”

The single soft word made Drift look up. Never once in all their dealings—as enemies or as allies—had he heard Prowl say that word.

“After Overlord got out of the ship yesterday,” Drift said. “Did I see what I think I saw?”

A flinch of Prowl’s doorwings was the only answer Drift needed. “That depends on what you believe you saw,” Prowl said anyway.

“What happened?” Drift asked.

“Did you notice that I was gone from the prison for about three days?” Prowl asked. “I was taken right after I gave you the access card.”

Drift stared impassively. He’d actually had no idea, but at the time he’d had other worries.

“The details aren’t important.” Prowl didn’t look like he was going to elaborate, even if Drift pushed. 

“If you come with us,” Drift said, noting with irritation that track time was almost over, and that he still hadn’t had time to reason through what to say in the minefield of a conversation that Ratchet still  might want to have with him, “will you help us search for the Knights?”

“I will devote my skills to a hunt for Primus himself if it gets me away from this planet,” Prowl said. “I don’t think we’ll find them, but I’ll abide by the parameters of the mission. I’ll swear to it.”

Good enough. With that promise made, the dangers of saying no to Prowl outweighed the dangers of taking him along. “Fine. You’re in. Wait for instructions,” Drift said, just as the chime rang, signaling that the prisoners had to line up to go back to the cell block.

\--

“Where are you going now?” Whirl asked way too loudly. Drift had gotten Whirl to cover for him the night after Overlord’s attack when he’d slipped over to the ventilation hatch above the workshop to repair the damage he’d caused in his trip to the Medibay during the attack. Luckily, no one had seemed to notice that it was out of place for a few hours. Whirl hadn’t been happy about it, though, seeming to think that Drift was planning to run off alone.

“Just to make sure that all of my preparations are still in place,” Drift assured him, lying.

“Just hurry back,” Whirl snapped, again making Drift cringe with his attention-attracting volume.

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” Drift asked, moving quickly down the shaft before Whirl could react to that. _Mouthing off to Whirl is not compatible with survival_ , Drift scolded himself.

Drift crawled in the opposite direction of the workshops, towards Rodimus’s cell. In reality, he couldn’t think in this cell with Whirl tapping his claws all the time and questioning him incessantly. He wanted at least a few minutes to talk to Rodimus about the state of things and to see if he had any ideas for what Drift could do next. At Drift’s insistence, they’d agreed not to talk to each other too much in public. Didn’t want anyone getting suspicious. 

Drift disconnected one of the energon infusers in the correct cell and tapped softly on the bottom of the tile. He heard the telltale sounds of the infuser being lifted to the side within seconds. Rodimus must have already been awake.

Once he was sure the infuser was clear, Drift lifted the tile away from the floor from beneath. Rodimus grabbed it and moved it off to the side so that Drift could climb up into the cell.

“Ready to tell me about your genius new plan?” Rodimus asked.

Drift cringed. “Not exactly.” He kept his voice hushed—Rewind still seemed to be asleep in the other berth.

Rodimus frowned. “Then why are you here?”

That stung. Rodimus was in some kind of mood tonight. “I wanted your advice, actually. I’m trying to figure out what to do next and nothing’s coming.”

“So now you want my advice?” Rodimus’s optics were narrowed.

“If you have something to say, then say it,” Drift snarled. Maybe coming here had been a mistake.

“Overlord. You were working with Prowl, and Overlord got out. It was your—” Rodimus restrained himself before he could actually voice the word _fault_ , but it hung in the air all the same. “You did something.”

 Drift was silent, unsure of how to respond. What did Rodimus want from him?

“You’re not even trying to deny it.”

“I could, but I would be lying.” Drift’s words were barely loud enough to reach Rodimus’s audials.

“How could you do something like that?” Rodimus’s voice was a little more patient, now that Drift had admitted it.

“Sometimes, if you really want something, you have to make sacrifices for it.”

“Those dead mechs? Those _seventeen_ dead mechs? They weren’t your sacrifices to make. You had no right,” Rodimus said. He kept his voice to a whisper, but Drift felt the words like knives through his plating all the same.

“You know I didn’t want that to happen,” Drift said, voice hushed.

Rodimus turned away, arms crossed. “I know. I know that. But it still happened, and people are still dead, and it was still for…this.” He made a hand gesture, but even without it Drift knew that he was referring to the escape.

“What do you want me to say, that I’m sorry?” Drift asked. “I am. I did it because I thought it was the only way, and yeah, if I’d known that people would get hurt, that he’d kill Pipes—yeah, I would’ve reconsidered. But—I have to do this, Rodimus. I have to get you out of here and we have to find the Knights. There isn’t another option.”

The silence in the cell, when Drift was finished, seemed to bear physical weight. Drift’s optics were steady on Rodimus’s flaring ones as Rodimus struggled to find something to say to that.

“I’ll go,” Drift said finally. If Rodimus wanted to wallow in guilt over this, fine—but he didn’t get to take it out on Drift. Rodimus didn’t say anything as Drift moved the tile back to its proper place and secured it over his head.

For a moment, Drift just lay there, whole body numb except for the tender throbbing that still ate at his ankle. Was Rodimus right? Had he gone too far? He’d been prepared to give up everything for this. Everything but the dream.

But that conviction didn’t extend to giving up others’ lives. It couldn’t.

He couldn’t live with that.

\--

“Good morning,” Ratchet said, walking over to the berth where Drift sat. A giddy thrill shot through Drift when he noticed the relaxation of Ratchet’s face that could have passed for a hint of a smile, and then he schooled himself.

_Everything_.

“Lovely morning to admire the furthest reaches of the Guiding Hand,” Drift said back, gesturing exaggeratedly at the starscape out the tiny window.

The hint of smile disappeared. “Sure. Whatever.”

Drift had wanted and expected the hostile response, but a part of him still keened when he got his wish. He silenced it, though, and continued. “Something wrong with appreciating Primus’s domain?”

“Drift.” Ratchet’s voice was gruff, but Drift’s uncooperative spark sang at Ratchet saying his name anyway. “You really going to do this?”

“I think that it’s my duty,” Drift replied. Ratchet visibly bristled. He waited a few seconds, until Ratchet had placed today’s medication dose in his hand, before playing his trump card. “I mean, anyone who turns to Primus in dark times can be made into a believer in the light.”

Ratchet whirled toward Drift, optics flaring, and then turned around to school his expression into one of professionalism. It was exactly the opening Drift needed. He poured the medication onto an absorbent pad on a nearby table while Ratchet’s optics were turned away.

When Ratchet turned back, he looked like he wanted to argue. Drift wiped his face of expression. “Get out,” Ratchet said.

Drift wanted to apologize. He’d crossed a line, he knew it. But that had been the point. And he’d achieved his goal. He was probably imagining it, but it felt like the symptoms of withdrawal were already settling back into his frame. He could feel a throb in his lines, an itch in his processor.

_Everything_.

The guard opened the door at Drift’s knock, and Drift extended his arms so that the guard could cuff them for the trip back to his cell. He could feel Ratchet’s eyes boring into his back the entire time.

He suppressed a cold shiver as the guard marched him down the hall, just like a different guard—was he among the dead? Drift hadn’t known his name—had a few days ago, when Drift had seen Overlord stomping out of his cell.

And then they were at the cell. Drift was stepping inside and extending his hands so that the guard could uncuff them. Then the guard was leaving and Drift was turning towards Whirl, who was laying back on his—Pipes’s— berth, one leg crossed over the other with his hands behind his helm.

“It’s off,” Drift said, when the guard was out of earshot.

Whirl didn’t respond. Drift wasn’t sure if he realized that Drift was talking to him.

“The escape is off,” Drift clarified. “We can’t do it.”

“What changed?” Whirl asked.

“I just made up my mind,” Drift said, not wanting to prolong this. The itch was already starting to spread from his processor down his limbs, until he could feel a weird, familiar buzzing in even his fingertips. “We’re not going.”

Now Whirl lifted his head up from the berth, optic boring dangerously into Drift’s. “I thought we had an understanding.”

Drift shrugged. “I never said that.”

Whirl clapped both of his claws in an odd pattern. “But we did.”

“Not my problem if Cyclonus decides to kill you.”

Now Whirl lurched up from the berth to tower over Drift, optic feet above Drift’s head. “We had an understanding.”

It was just a matter of tipping the balance. “If you want my opinion, he’d be doing the universe a favor.”

And that was what did it. Whirl slammed Drift against a wall so hard that his optics fritzed. Drift swung a punch in retaliation, making contact with one of Whirl’s gangly arms. Whirl tackled him, though, and they scuffled on the floor for a bit, Drift throwing punches at Whirl’s face and trying to avoid a pounding from Whirl’s claws.

“Hey! Break it up!” a guard said from outside the cell, too soon. Drift continued punching, and Whirl followed suit. Then the cell was open and Drift was helpless on the tile, shaking from the aftereffects of a zap from a nightstick. Whirl, on the floor next to him, looked similarly afflicted.

“That wasn’t an assault, it was a full-on fight,” one guard said. Drift couldn’t move his head to see who was speaking.

Then, a different voice: “Haul them both off to solitary.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're reading this as I post, make sure you read chapter 9 first! I posted chapters 9 and 10 at the same time.
> 
> This chapter depicts a nervous breakdown, which I wasn't sure how to warn for in tags. Please be mindful of that and take care of yourself.

Some illogical part of Drift had thought that the nightmare would end, somehow, when the guards decided that he had to go to solitary. But when the moment came, time did as it does and moved at its normal pace. Drift and Whirl were both cuffed and walked down the hallway, through a door into a dimly lit corridor that Drift knew was originally meant to house particularly uncooperative or violent cargo. This wouldn’t be the first time Drift had seen the inside of one of these particular cells.

The interior was cold, though Drift couldn’t entirely tell if the ambient temperature was actually different or if the difference was just the isolation. In the main cell block, there was always noise—someone shouting, someone banging on something, someone singing garish war songs. Here, there was no one, and there was silence.

Drift tried to take a moment to actually enjoy it—time away from Whirl, who he couldn’t hear a peep out of even though he suspected that they were in adjacent cells. Time alone with his thoughts, like he’d been seeking for the week since the ship had moved into orbit.

He tried to go over his hastily thrown-together plan, tried to find any weaknesses and bolster them. He tried to look at the tattoos that had given him this new idea in the first place to make sure that the plan would go smoothly.

But he couldn’t concentrate. Part of it was the withdrawal symptoms. He’d been depending on them to make him look wigged out and distressed, but in setting up that aspect of the plan he’d somehow forgotten to account for how genuinely unpleasant the symptoms would be.

The other part of it was that his thoughts kept turning to the conversation he’d had with Rodimus. Rodimus had blamed him for all the destruction Overlord had caused. Was he right to? Wasn’t he? Would Prowl have found a way to bring Chromedome on board without Drift’s involvement? Would Overlord still have been able to exploit the same weakness? Drift knew so little about what had happened. Would the weight of Pipes and those sixteen other sparks rest upon his soul forever, like those of so many others a lifetime ago?

At some point he’d migrated to the stark berth in a corner of the cell. He was curled on his side, staring at his sword. He didn’t remember taking it out of its sheath.

He should put it back. He knew that he would lose his sword privileges if he used it for violence—luckily, the administration had considered fighting off Overlord to be an exception. He should put it away. But he couldn’t move, his hands shaking as they held onto the blade, the sharp edge pricking the smallest of the lines in his fingers, smearing the blade with energon.

The sight of his own energon jerked him back to rationality, at least a little. He lifted his head from the berth and sheathed the sword, careful not to cut anything else with how badly his hands were now shaking from the withdrawal.

He would absolutely take a circuit booster if one was presented to him right now. How had he ever managed to get through this before? It had been his hopes and dreams, he distantly remembered. There was an answer to the bitter question.

But what had that led to? Blood, violence, murder, all the way up through Overlord’s rampage two days ago. Up to Pipes’ lifeless body lying prone and crushed on the floor, up to Ratchet staring at him with kindness in his optics even as he too bled onto the Medibay floor. So many bad things that wouldn’t have happened if Drift had died as a guttermech addict all those years ago.

Drift was standing now. He didn’t remember standing. But the position gave him an idea. He lined his palm up with the sharpest edge of the berth and rammed into the metal, open-handed. The cut that the sword had made disappeared under a deeper laceration. Energon welled up from it.

Drift did the same with the other hand. He barely felt it, between the sharp throbbing that seemed to be ubiquitous throughout his body from the withdrawal, and the strange buzzing in his processor that he didn’t remember from previous withdrawals, but that made everything dull and slow.

Seventeen. The number had been the only thought he’d had for a while, he realized distantly. Seventeen lives. Maybe if he could externalize it somehow, he’d be able to think again.

He’d painted the seventeen tallies on the wall in energon by the time the guard came to check on him. He’d painted dozens more. It wasn’t enough.

\--

The cell wasn’t cold anymore. There were too many people for that. Drift was still there. A guard had guided him to a seated position on the berth, where he now sat, optics fixed on the wall of varyingly straight tally marks he had drawn. His hand was still leaking, but the flow had slowed to a trickle. It hadn’t been a very deep wound.

Drift had a plan. He wanted something to happen next. If he thought about it, he was sure he could figure out what it was that he wanted. He was certain that it wasn’t sleep, but sleep seemed to be what his body wanted anyway. Even with the irritating withdrawal symptoms screaming in his frame, his limbs felt heavy.

“I was paged here?”

Drift felt himself settle back into his body at the sound of Ratchet’s voice. His optics were turned expectantly on the door when Ratchet walked through it, carrying a briefcase-sized medical kit in one hand.

“What have you gotten yourself into now?” Ratchet asked, setting the kit down and crouching to one knee in front of Drift. Like Drift expected, he didn’t wait for a response. Instead, he turned to the three guards crowding the small space of the cell. “Can we have the room, please?”

“He was placed in solitary after a violent altercation with his cellmate—”

Ratchet’s optics flicked skyward and then returned to the guard who had spoken. “Yeah, some genius decides to put two former Wreckers together in the same cell and they start punching each other? Who would’ve thought? Anyway, does he look violent now? No. Give us the room.”

The guard didn’t argue further. He jerked his head and the other two followed him out. They left the door open to the hallway, though, and Drift could hear them stop right outside the door.

“Alright,” Ratchet said, putting featherlight fingertips on Drift’s wrist to acclimate him to the contact before plugging some diagnostic equipment into the port at his wrist. “It’s okay.”

Either the words or the touch broke something in Drift. Suddenly the pain in his hand felt real, as if it was actually happening to him and not someone else, and the events of the past—how long had it been, anyway? Hours?—suddenly felt a lot more frightening.

Drift’s vents hitched and his optics burned. Ratchet noticed. He looked up from the diagnostic device, concerned. His hand, which had been holding Drift’s wrist in place by the fingertips, adjusted so that Ratchet’s palm was pressed comfortingly to the back of Drift’s hand. The change was almost more overwhelming, at first, and Drift couldn’t stop himself from shuddering. Ratchet looked at Drift’s face with keen, calm optics until Drift stilled again. He turned back to the diagnostic readout.

“Not what I was expecting,” he said, probably to himself. He turned to Drift, expression now confused, hand still secure on Drift’s injured, energon-stained one. “How?”

“I didn’t take it,” Drift admitted. His voice came out staticky, as if he’d forgotten how to speak in the few hours he’d been left in here. He didn’t want Ratchet to think he was some kind of medical mystery.

And that brought back the question of what he did want. He knew there was a goal here, and the more astute part of him that could comprehend things beyond the pain and exhaustion was smug with how close he was to that goal.

But most of him just wanted to rest. He just wanted to sit here with Ratchet, the warmth of Ratchet’s hand making him feel like he might deserve to be alive.

“I suppose you aren’t going to explain why?” Ratchet quipped. It was one of his questions that didn’t have an answer, which was fine, because Drift didn’t feel like talking. Ratchet disconnected the device and sat back, hand not breaking contact with Drift’s. He looked like he was going to say something else, but in the end he just sighed and turned his head back towards the guards. “I want psych to evaluate him,” he said.

Part of Drift was elated. This was good. Most of him was saddened, though, because Ratchet had slipped his hand away from Drift’s.

“No problem,” one of the guards said, walking back into the cell. “I’ll just grab that before we go up, though. No weapons up at the funny farm.” One hand reached for Drift’s sword. Drift started to flinch back, but Ratchet was blocking the guard’s arm before he even got close.

“No,” Ratchet said simply.

“It’s a rule. Look at him, does it look like he’s gonna protest?”

“Look at me. If you take that sword from him, now or when you get upstairs, I will write you up for mistreatment. Do I look like I’m joking?”

The guard shifted his optics away from Ratchet. “No, doc.”

“Good. Because I’ll do it. And I’d be within the rules, too.” Ratchet was clearly trying very hard not to break out the religious argument that let Drift keep the sword in prison in the first place. Drift wouldn’t hold it against him. Not now.

“Understood.” The guard looked irritated, but Ratchet seemed to believe that he would comply with the request-slash-threat. Ratchet gave the guard one more appraising look and then turned back to Drift, meeting his optics. He put a hand on Drift’s shoulder.

“We’re gonna have one of the specialists up in psych look you over, but I can be up there in just a few minutes if you need my help. Just say the word,” Ratchet said. “I’ll have someone bring up the medication dose you missed, but if you have any physical symptoms besides the ones you expect, you have them call me, okay?”

Rather than speaking in front of the guards, Drift nodded.

“Good,” Ratchet said. He pulled his hand away, suddenly awkward, packed up his kit haphazardly, and all but dashed away. The chill resettled in Drift’s frame as soon as he was gone.

“Alright, inmate, with me,” the guard said, holding out a pair of cuffs. Practically on instinct, Drift extended his hands.

\--

They’d brought him right to Rung’s office, where Rung had taken one look at him and ordered the guards to have him rest and refuel and then come back in the morning. That was perfectly alright with Drift. Between working on the escape during the nights, not having a functioning infuser, the cuts on his hands from solitary, and the strain of missing his medication, the chance to really recharge was alluring.

He gave himself an hour. A guard brought him the missed dose of medication a few minutes after he arrived, which helped exponentially. He lay on the berth under the too-bright lights for a while and felt more alert than he had since before Overlord’s attack. The demons that the attack had roused were quiet again.

He was still tired when he awoke, under low recharge-cycle lighting, but it was an almost pleasant kind of tired. Reminding him how much he’d accomplished, how close he was. He awoke determined to finish what he’d started. His mission came from Primus, and none but Primus could successfully stand in the way of its fulfillment.

First, Drift reviewed the three tattoos on his legs that described the top level of the ship. One was the floor plan, artfully stylized in a variety of colors so that one who wasn’t looking for it wouldn’t realize that it was there. Another was the grid of the air circulation, and the last was the ship’s coolant circulation, which primarily went through the outer walls of each level.

The little storage rooms that Drift had correctly suspected had been converted into the cells-slash-patient-berthrooms in psych backed right up to the hub of the coolant system. All Drift had to do was tear a tiny crevice out of the wall and he’d have access to the system—access that would let him route coolant from one particular tube into its redundant system. The change would take days for anyone to notice, and by the time they did Drift intended to be long gone.

He worked quickly, and by the time the full lighting came back on, he had secured his crew’s passage from the workshop to the area just beneath the airlock on the top floor. There were still details that needed to fall into place—Drift would need to coordinate with Ultra Magnus and Chromedome, the two crewmembers currently outside the prison, and he might need to build a stronger tool to chisel out the hole he would need to drill in the wall of the workshop the night of the escape—but he’d made it this one step. For now, that was what mattered.

“Hello, Drift,” Rung greeted when Drift was led to his office in the morning. “How are you feeling today?”

“Much better,” Drift said. “Yesterday was…a fluke.”

Rung nodded like he understood. Drift supposed that he would be good at that. “Do you think you could tell me what brought it on?”

“Um, my cellmate was killed, when Overlord attacked,” Drift said, as he’d rehearsed. “I got hurt, too, and by the time I got back from the Medibay I had a different cellmate. It was like they were trying to make me forget about Pipes, like they were trying to replace him—and I understand it’s not some huge conspiracy to—I don’t even know.”

“You felt like they were trying to erase Pipes?” Rung guessed.

Drift nodded. “I picked a fight with Whirl because the whole situation just felt wrong.”

Rung wrote something down on the datapad on his desk. “Ratchet reported that you deliberately skipped a dose of a medication you’re taking?” he prompted, apparently satisfied with Drift’s explanation for the fight with Whirl.

Drift looked down at his hands, fingers intertwined in his lap. The wounds from yesterday had healed almost entirely. Only Ratchet’s expert weldlines remained. “I did,” he said, hoping that Rung would guess at Drift’s planned explanation—that he wanted to be in physical pain to help mitigate the survivor’s guilt—without making Drift spell it out. He didn’t want it to sound too practiced.

“And why did you do that?”

No dice. “I guess I just…wanted it to hurt.”

“What do you mean by ‘it’?”

Drift shrugged again. “Life.”

A gleam caught on Rung’s optic. Success?

“Do you think that that urge to hurt yourself—” Drift cringed at the terminology, like he knew he’d do if he was here without an ulterior motive “—was because of Pipes’ death?”

“Maybe?” Drift said. “It just felt…not fair. That I got to live and he didn’t.” Drift shivered, and it wasn’t an affectation. The past tense was the only lie in that sentence.

“Do you still feel like hurting yourself will help you feel better?”

“No,” Drift said. “I was trying to avoid reality, but uh, I guess the lesson here is that that doesn’t work.” He summoned a wobbly half-smile.

Rung wrote something else down, and then changed the subject to coping strategies—nothing that Drift hadn’t heard before. Drift tried to look like he was taking it seriously. It wasn’t like it was bad advice—making friends, following routines, carving out safe places for yourself—but Drift didn’t intend to be here long enough to employ any of it.

“I’m going to recommend that you be transferred back to the cell block,” Rung said after a while. “How does that make you feel?”

“I feel okay about it. I’m ready to face the world again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting close =D I'll probably edit & post chapters 11 and 12 concurrently also, a few days from now. I still don't have a functioning laptop, so I've been editing and posting from a public computer in the back corner of a campus library. Thanks for reading! :D


	11. Chapter 11

Three days later, the track seemed to have gone back its usual hyperactive, vaguely malicious energy. The sobering effect of Overlord’s attack and the riot didn’t seem to have lasted. It was almost better this way—familiar. Easier to ignore.

Of course, it was easy enough to ignore pretty much anything going on in the background when Rewind and Prowl seemed about to get into a very unfair fistfight right in front of him. Rewind hadn’t known that Prowl was joining them on the Lost Light, and apparently vehemently opposed it. Prowl seemed more inclined toward snarled monosyllables than actually combating Rewind’s arguments. Tailgate was looking back and forth between them, optics wide.

Drift had thought that this meeting would be most productive if Cyclonus and Whirl were the ones not present. Apparently he’d been wrong.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Drift finally said, interrupting Rewind, who was deep in a tirade about how Prowl felt the need to ruin other people’s happiness because he was unhappy himself. They could deal with their weird interpersonal dynamic on the Lost Light. Rewind didn’t look happy about being cut off, but he turned his attention to Drift. Prowl, on the other hand, looked pleased, and Drift had to suppress a brief urge to tell Rewind to keep on yelling at him. “Are all your cells ready for tonight?” Drift continued, jumping in to the actual point of the meeting.

Nods all around. Tailgate for himself and Cyclonus, Rewind for himself and Rodimus, and Prowl had a two-person cell all to himself. Drift had elected to keep this group as small as possible and have people relay the information back to their respective cellmates. He didn’t want the guards to see a group of seven mechs having a serious discussion next to the track and start to think that they were, well, planning exactly what they were planning.

“What time?” Prowl asked, straight to the point.

“We start five minutes after the first patrol of the recharge cycle,” Drift said, glad to be back on topic. “We’ll all meet in the workshop. Rewind, you and Rodimus are going to be coming from here.” He pointed to a spot on the tattoo that represented the floor plan of the cell block. “So you start crawling away from the entrance and then when you hit a wall, turn left. Tailgate, you’ll be coming from the opposite direction, here.” He continued to walk them through the plan, all the way up through the airlock on the topmost level. “Any questions?”

There were none. Drift dismissed them, making sure that Rewind and Prowl walked off in separate directions.

“I need your help.”

Drift whipped his head around, alarmed that the owner of the voice had been able to sneak up on him, but trying not to act too startled. “Absolutely not,” he said, once he was looking into Arcee’s optics.

“Why not? You’re helping Prowl,” she said. “I just need to know what you’re doing with him.”

“Then ask him yourself,” Drift said tonelessly, turning away from Arcee to survey the track in front of him. Having her outside his line of sight made some lingering paranoia flare up, but it was worth it for the disaffected image that he was able to project.

“I have,” Arcee said. “He doesn’t tell me things anymore.”

Since Drift’s optics were outside Arcee’s line of sight, he let them widen incredulously. He’d known that Prowl and Arcee were partners in Prowl’s schemes—Arcee taking the fall for Ratbat’s murder, which Prowl had obviously incited her to carry out, attested to that. But Drift had never imagined that the two were actually friends.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Drift said. “He approached me. Nobody forced him into it. He’s not doing anything he doesn’t want to do.”

“Thank you,” Arcee said, her voice so soft it could have been formed in Drift’s imagination among the noise around the track. She disappeared as quietly as she’d come.

\--

Day 21. The last day of the tapered medication, not counting the built-in placebo week. Planned perfectly to Drift’s last day on the ship and his last visit to its Medibay.

And with its medic.

“Get in any surprise fights today?” Ratchet said by way of greeting. Only Ratchet would tease him for how violent Drift’s time on the ship had ended up being.

“Not yet, but it’s still early,” Drift replied. He extended an arm, which Ratchet took without looking Drift in the optics.

“You are personally aging my spark.”

“I make life interesting. You’re going to miss me when I’m done with this course,” Drift teased, testing the waters. For a split second, the corners of Ratchet’s mouth twitched up in a smile. Something like triumph—or maybe like joy—rushed through Drift’s lines.

This, Drift realized, was the worst part about leaving. He’d come to like Ratchet, ever since his quiet admission to Drift that first day. He liked talking to him, liked the way Ratchet teased him about mundane things and was there for him when the heavier things made themselves apparent. More than anything, Drift had come to rely on him. When everything else was chaotic, Ratchet was comforting familiarity. When everything else was fear and pain, Ratchet was safety. When the mission and this ship and even Rodimus made Drift feel like a weapon, like no more than a means to an end, Ratchet reminded him that he was a person.

Drift didn’t want to lose him. But he couldn’t risk the escape by telling him about it.

“No way I’ll miss you. Keep up your habits and you’ll be in here every other day anyway,” Ratchet replied gruffly. He looked up and handed Drift his medication dose.

Drift made a decision. He kept the vial steady in one hand. The other he placed on the back of Ratchet’s neck, gently easing his face down towards Drift’s.

Their lips met with a rush so intense that Drift forgot that he was in the prison Medibay, forgot that the war was over and that it had ever started, forgot about everything but himself and Ratchet. Drift’s hand on Ratchet’s neck, Ratchet’s soft and warm on Drift’s upper arm, their mouths pressed together as if all their time apart had been a mistake, and this was how they were meant to be.

Drift could have spent an eternity there, but Ratchet pulled away. “I’m sorry. That was inappropriate.” His face was still unprofessionally close to Drift’s, his voice quiet.

“Why? I may be in prison, but I can still have feelings.”

“That’s not—” Ratchet started to recoil, his voice growing a bit louder.

Drift moved his hand from Ratchet’s neck to his wrist. His grip was light, nothing more than a manifestation of his hope that Ratchet wouldn’t pull away completely.

Ratchet didn’t. His frame seemed frozen in the air, face hovering just above Drift’s, as if something about the moment would break if he dared move. His mouth hung slightly open and his optics were conflicted, steady on Drift’s own as if they might contain the answer to his questions.

It wasn’t much, but it was something. It was as much as Drift was going to get. It was enough to risk everything on. 

_Everything_.

“Do you ever think about the voyage?” Drift asked, so quietly that the words would barely reach Ratchet’s audials.

Then the moment shattered. A pair of guards walked into the room, an inmate missing half of his leg being supported between them. Ratchet’s face went from mesmerized to horrified in a moment, and then he turned away.

“Take your medication,” Ratchet ordered, slipping his arm out of Drift’s grip and leaving him cold. There was a guard watching him now, waiting to escort Drift back to his cell.

Drift took the medication, not tasting it as it went down his intake, and stood, extending his hands to be cuffed. His whole body felt numb. He’d been so stupid.

He’d tried to risk the mission, for the one thing that he had outside of it. It was only natural that Primus hadn’t let him.

Drift was a different person now. A better one. But he still had sins upon sins to pay for, a debt to those he’d killed that would never be erased. His life now had a purpose, and that was more than he deserved.

He heard Ratchet turn towards him as he was led out of the room. He didn’t turn back. Drift imagined his optics lingering on Drift’s frame until he was completely out of sight.

\--

“You should know, Pointy, that this is a rather tight fit.”

“Prisons weren’t designed to be broken out of. What, did you think we’d be walking out?” Drift asked, his voice pitched in a whisper as he crawled down the air circulation shaft towards the entrance into the workshop. “If it bothers you that much, go back to the cell and serve out the rest of your sentence.”

“And here I was, thinking that you could take a joke.”

Drift ignored the rebuttal in favor of arranging his body so that he could unscrew the bolts on the grate in the workshop ceiling with his sword. His spark was practically spasming with anxiety. Every word, every movement, every second was a gamble. One mistake, one stroke of bad luck, and it was over. For all of them.

Unscrewing the grate took a long few minutes, made longer by Drift’s growing urge to kick Whirl as the other kept up a constant stream of muttering about confined spaces. Eventually, though, he was lifting the grate up into the shaft and dropping into the workshop, landing confidently between two workstations. Whirl followed immediately, and Drift had barely crossed the room to puzzle over the next step when Rodimus and Rewind dropped into the room as well.

“Do you need the laser cutter?” Rodimus asked, already walking over to the corner where they’d made their original egress from this room.

“Actually, no,” Drift said. It would take hours to cut through the wall and then the coolant tube using it, and besides, the tool couldn’t move that far from its power source and still work. No, there was an easier way.

First, Drift checked the tattoos, lining up the exact center of one wall of the workshop with the first-floor coolant map. He only had one shot at this.

Once he was sure he was in the right place, he drew an oval in the wall with his sword. The slight indentation would hopefully be enough for the explosion to cut through the rest of the metal.

Drift lifted the sword over his wrist cabling. When he was about to cut, intending to make a small nick, there was a crash from the middle of the room.

Drift jerked and turned just in time to see Tailgate leap to his feet after he’d tripped over a workstation during his jump from the ceiling. “I’m okay!” he said to Cyclonus, who had just lowered himself onto the workshop floor much more gracefully, glowering.

“Drift?” Rewind’s voice was concerned.

“What is it?”

“Your hand.” He pointed, and Drift looked down at the arm he’d been planning to cut.

He’d cut it, alright. As soon as he noticed the long slice, practically laying open the major line that ran the length of his forearm, the pain set in.

Drift shrugged it off. “It’s fine.” At least this way, he wouldn’t have to worry about the explosion not being powerful enough. He caught some of the energon dripping from his arm in his other hand and painted a thick streak of it around the oval he’d drawn on the wall. Sparking it by running his sword over the metal of the wall was a clumsier process than it had been the last time he’d done this, but it worked. The oval blew off, the edges charred, just after Drift managed to duck out of the way.

He peered into the section of wall that he’d exposed. About three-quarters of the hole had also ripped through the coolant tube behind it. Not bad, considering the questionable maps he’d had access to.

Drift met Rodimus’s optics, which were worried for some reason. “Ready to get out of here and never come back?”

Rodimus eyed Drift critically. “Yeah, but are you sure you don’t need a field patch on that?” He gestured at Drift’s still-leaking arm.

“It’s fine. Come on. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Drift, who knew the plans best, went first. The inside walls of the coolant shafts were designed for ease of maintenance, so there was a ladder on one side that led up and up, until the shaft arced out of Drift’s line of sight.

The ascent was quick, even with Drift losing fuel and stopping every so often to make sure that the whole of the party was still there. Rodimus was right behind him, practically hovering, obviously as eager to get this over with as Drift was. Rewind was right behind him, followed by Tailgate, then Cyclonus, then Prowl. Whirl had taken up the rear, and the comments about confined spaces appeared to not extend to this situation. Drift suspected that he had Cyclonus’s presence to thank for the change.

They were so close, but in some ways they were in more danger than ever. Someone could chicken out and run off to tell a guard what they were up to in exchange for a reduced sentence. Someone could have been playing them from the beginning. Someone could do something stupid and slip and make too much noise in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The coolant tube ended at a metal wall, which Drift had ensured would be there when he’d switched the circulation pattern from the cell in Psych. Beyond it was a full coolant tube. There was an access hatch that they didn’t need to explode into existence on their side of the tube, but it was alarmed.

Drift had been betting that the neutrals who’d owned this ship hadn’t changed the alarm system. He’d been right. The alarm was easily dismantled, even though it had a few extra wires that somehow hadn’t made it into his plans. They were easily ignorable, though, and Whirl had barely started muttering again by the time Drift managed to ease open the access hatch.

He climbed out of the tube into the top-floor maintenance closet, where one mech sat in a corner looking at a datapad.

The mech—blue, badgeless, and about Drift’s height—lurched to his feet and drew a blaster before Drift was even entirely in the room. Millennia of battle instincts took over. Drift shifted his posture slightly so that instead of climbing out of the tube, he was leaping forward to tackle the mech, drawing his sword at the same time.

It would have been so easy to take the mech’s head off with one clean cut. But something stayed Drift’s hand. Mostly, it was the memory of Rodimus refusing to let Drift kill Ratchet to get them out in time, back when the execution had loomed but everything else had been so much simpler. But Drift liked to think that part of it was just him. Wanted to think that even after all he’d done, from when he’d first picked up a blaster, to Crystal City, to when he’d killed those sleeping slave traders on a ship just like this one, to all he’d done for the Autobots after—he wanted to think that he could still make different choices. This mech wasn’t evil. He was just doing his job. Sparing even one innocent mech was what Wing would have wanted from him.

Drift let his sword swing in an arc around the mech’s head, planting itself in the floor. The mech’s blaster tore through his shoulder at the same moment.

Drift went flying, but not before he caught a flash of red and yellow out of the corner of one optic. He heard rather than saw Rodimus tackle the maintenance worker, but had stopped rolling across the floor and refocused his optics on the scuffle in time to see Rodimus jam the butt of the other bot’s own blaster into his spinal conduit, temporarily leaving him unconscious.

Rodimus looked at Drift, right after. _I did the right thing_ , Drift thought to himself even as his HUD flashed him irritating messages about how much active energon he’d lost.

“Out the door,” Drift said as Rodimus fixed the blaster to his side and started hauling Drift to his feet. Whirl walked over and offered an arm for Drift to steady himself. It was a sweet gesture, but Drift wasn’t sure that anything but lying down could even possibly help with the dizziness.

Rewind ran ahead to the door and turned the handle. It creaked a bit as he eased it open, peering out into the hallway as soon as he had a large enough crack to see through.

As soon as he did, he visibly recoiled, visor widening. He tried to close the door again, but it resisted. And then it slammed open, revealing what looked like a dozen guards between them and the airlock. All of them wielded blasters, pointed straight at Drift and the others’ frames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cliffhangers right to the end ~ 
> 
> thanks for sticking with me!


	12. Chapter 12

For a moment, nobody moved. The prisoners didn’t charge and the guards didn’t shoot. It was like the two groups didn’t quite know what to do with each other out of their usual context.

Then a voice rang out from behind the guards. “Drop your weapons. I’ll handle this.”

The guards obeyed, some immediately, some reluctantly, until all of them had holstered their blasters and stepped off to the sides of the hallway. Between them was Bumblebee, leaning on his cane with his head held high in the middle of the hallway.

“So,” Bumblebee said, optics on Rodimus. “After everything you still want to run away from our home?”

“Can you blame us?” Rodimus practically spat.

“I expected this behavior from you, Rodimus. Optimus takes the coward’s way out, gets to run off into space and pretend it solves all our problems, and of course you have to follow in his footsteps, like always.”

“I feel the need to point out that running off into space was my idea first,” Rodimus offered unhelpfully.

Bumblebee ignored him. “But from you, Prowl, I expected better.”

“What would you have had me do?” Prowl asked, ice in his voice. “I told you that the war hadn’t ended, you ignored me and had me arrested. The Decepticons kidnapped and experimented on me, and for you, that changed nothing. Why should I stay here?”

“Because this planet is our home,” Bumblebee said, soft, reasonable, everything that Drift had once expected from him. “And I’m doing whatever it takes to protect our place here. _Whatever_ it takes.”

“You can say that all day, but it doesn’t make it right,” Rodimus said.

“How about I say some other things, then? I saw Prowl have Ratbat killed and it helped. Having Metalhawk killed _helped_. Grounding the Lost Light and keeping the Autobots that you might have taken away from Cybertron on it _helped_. New Iacon is thriving. The provisional government is holding an election soon. There’s a faction-neutral bar and there’s talks of starting a police force. Everything that I’ve done has worked.”

“It hasn’t worked for me,” Rodimus yelled. “I don’t know where you got the idea that you can just keep killing people until peace somehow manifests.”

Drift’s eyes flicked to Prowl, who was almost certainly part of the reason for this new MO of Bumblebee’s. Prowl’s face was set in a deep frown, optics burning.

“It’s one life for thousands, Rodimus,” Bumblebee said. “Sometimes death is the best choice. Surely you of all people understand that.”

Even after all Bumblebee had done, that was a shockingly low blow. Drift felt Rodimus, who he was still leaning on, recoil.

“So what happens now?” Drift asked, optics moving from the airlock just down the hallway to Bumblebee. “You take us back to our cells, we do our time like good citizens and then get released into your fragile little spaceport utopia?”

To his credit, Bumblebee didn’t smile at the assumption. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he asked. “But no, I don’t think so. The neutrals still reeling from their leader’s untimely demise will be just as mollified if Metalhawk’s killer was murdered in a prison fight rather than executed on the same ship. And as for the rest of you? You’re all just obstacles to peace.”

Drift could have sworn that he saw a shadow pass through the faint light filtered through the airlock. That would be Chromedome, on one of the Lost Light’s shuttles, waiting for their signal. “That is the most Decepticon thing I’ve ever heard an Autobot say,” he said, his voxcoder slurring the words. All excess energy was being diverted to his self-repair systems.

At his side, Drift felt Rodimus straighten. “Bee, we’ve worked together a long time,” he said. “Since long before you started colluding with Starscream and whoever you’ve got representing the neutrals now. You know that the first I heard of Metalhawk’s death was when I was being arrested for his murder. So, after all that, can’t you just let us go? Say something exploded and we all died. Say whatever you need to. But just let us leave.”

“No. I’m not going to do that,” Bumblebee said. “If I’ve lost the right to call myself honorable, I’m damn well at least going to be honest.” He raised his cane, revealing its secondary function as a gun, and shrieks of alarm chorused in Drift’s mind as he realized that Bumblebee intended to shoot Rodimus himself. Drift moved to block the shot, but he was so slow—

The _choom_ of a single blaster shot rang out, and Drift flinched, bracing for the shot, but the hit never came. As soon as he realized that the shot hadn’t been fired towards Rodimus, he looked up.

Bumblebee was on the ground, leaking from a shoulder wound, optics dark. Behind him, blaster still raised, stood Ratchet.

Drift rebooted his optics, unable to convince himself that this was really happening.

Ratchet secured his blaster at his hip and walked forward, stopping right in front of Drift. Drift could see his aura and hear his engine and feel the warmth rolling off of his frame.

“You’re here,” Drift said dumbly, voxcoder still slurring.

“I’m here.” Ratchet’s voice held the note of reserved warmth that Drift had spent so long trying to pry from him. From Ratchet, it was practically the same as _there’s no place I’d rather be_. “And in good time, it looks like.” Ratchet’s optics pointedly moved from Drift’s face to the still-leaking slash on one arm to the blaster wound on his other shoulder.

Drift shrugged sheepishly, as well as he could.

Ratchet gave him a probing, inscrutable look and then turned to face the guards, who still lined the hallway, many of them with their hands back on their blasters.

“You have a few different choices here,” Ratchet said mildly. His own blaster hung limply at his side, and his palms were extended in the open air. “You could call the head guard, sound an alarm, recapture all these prisoners, and be doing your jobs. Or,” Ratchet paused, making it seem like his next words had more weight. “You could step away, go downstairs, and pretend you were never here. What’s Bumblebee going to do? What story could he come up with that could justify him firing all of you over this? Plus, we’re Autobots leaving the planet. Far as I can tell, that’s exactly what you want.”

The next moment seemed to last a lifetime as Drift tried to read the facial expressions and auras of the guards. Then one decided. His aura turned from indecisive to resolute. He nodded at Ratchet and walked away down the hall.

They followed in a stream after that, five of them just relieved not to have been the one to have made the move first, the rest more reluctantly. But after a minute, the hallway was clear.

“The airlock. The signal,” Drift said, his voice coming out staticky.

Rewind ran ahead to the airlock, Tailgate on his heels, Cyclonus watching sharply but making no move to follow. Ratchet approached Drift, who was still leaning on—and probably getting energon all over—Rodimus and Whirl.

“Sit down, I can tell you’re about to pass out,” Ratchet said, taking Drift’s uninjured shoulder in his hand and easing him down toward the floor himself. “And I know you don’t want to miss this moment.”

As if on cue, Rewind yelled “They’re docking!”

The wave of relief that swept through Drift left him exhausted. They’d done it. The shuttle was docking. The hallway was empty of their enemies. Rodimus was safe.

Drift was alive. And Ratchet was here. It was everything he hadn’t dared hope for.

“How’d you know?” he slurred, looking up at Ratchet, whose face was the only object in focus.

“Know what?” Ratchet asked, seemingly genuinely confused. Drift realized that Ratchet might be thinking about their kiss earlier that day.

“About the escape,” Drift corrected.

Ratchet’s jaw dropped. Then he laughed, first a little incredulous thing that grew to a healthy bout of it. “You thought I didn’t know?”

Drift didn’t say anything, but something about his expression set Ratchet off again. Drift was about to snap a warning about volume, even though the hallway was well and truly soundproofed, when Ratchet finally calmed himself.

“I knew there was something off about your being here since the beginning,” Ratchet said, kneeling in front of Drift, with a hand in his. The angle was such that Ratchet could pretend that he was examining it if someone noticed, but Drift had seen him give the wound on his forearm a cursory glance and since then Ratchet’s optics had stayed on Drift’s. “Shooting up that marketplace? Never like you, but you forget that I saw you right after Vector Sigma. I was in those meetings with Optimus and Bumblebee. You were hellbent on getting the Lost Light off the ground. I’d never seen you so passionate about anything before.” Ratchet’s expression grew distant for a moment, as if he pined for something about that time, fraught as everything had been. “I realized it after you’d been here three days and almost died from what looked like wartime torture on the track.”

“I thought maybe…Overlord,” Drift slurred.

“That whole escapade of yours answered a few questions, yeah. But I already knew.”

“And you didn’t tell.”

“Who would I have told?” Ratchet asked softly. “Optimus is gone. Bumblebee only cares about rebuilding this world into something that I’m too cynical to think it can ever be. And,” he looked over at Rodimus, who had been hovering over the conversation “you were in here. Captain.”

Rodimus preened at the word, a smile alighting on his face. It was as contagious as his moods always were, and Drift managed an exhausted smile too.

“Airlock’s ready to open!” Tailgate’s voice rang down the hallway.

It was like a dream. But it was real. Drift struggled towards standing, and Rodimus and Ratchet helped him stand up and limp over to the airlock.

Rewind was already grasping Chromedome’s hand from the top of a ladder that had been rolled down, and Tailgate was right behind him. Cyclonus stood nearby, watching Tailgate’s ascent. Whirl hunkered at the far side of the hallway, optic on Cyclonus.

“Go,” Drift said to Rodimus, who along with Ratchet had been trying to maneuver Drift’s weak frame straight toward the ladder. “I’m not going up before you. I will stand here all night arguing. Go.”

Rodimus frowned but didn’t argue. He scampered up the ladder behind Whirl, leaving just Ratchet, Drift, and Prowl on the ship.

Ratchet was supporting Drift as he took one shaky step up the ladder when it happened. Several guards, different from the ones Ratchet had talked down, burst through the door at the end of the hallway, booking it for them and already starting to shoot.

Of course it had been too good to be true. “Get out of here. I’ll cover you,” Drift said, reaching for the blaster strapped to Ratchet’s side.

Ratchet clamped a hand down on it, looking Drift in the optics. “No! I won’t leave you here.”

“Leave me.”

Ratchet and Drift turned simultaneously to Prowl, who had spoken. He already had his hand extended for the blaster. “I can’t get revenge for what the Decepticons did to me out in space. Here, my chances are. Well. More than that,” he said. Ratchet lifted his hand off the blaster, indecisive, and Prowl sprung forward and grabbed it, laying down a line of cover fire and stopping the advancing guards in their tracks. He turned his optics right at Drift for a split second, his expression resigned but stubborn. “Go.”

“Drift! Come on!” Rodimus called from the shuttle above. His face, along with Tailgate’s, Rewind’s, and Whirl’s, ringed the entrance to the shuttle.

This wasn’t a moment of divine intervention. It was Prowl making a choice. Somehow, it felt the same.

Drift started to climb.

\--

Consciousness came to Drift in disparate chunks. The sense of light in front of his optics, even though he still had them shuttered. A low background hum that Drift knew to associate with space travel. Slightly different, though, than the background hum of the prison ship—

Drift’s optics flew open. Was this—

“Welcome back to the land of the living.” Ratchet’s voice held a note of exasperation.

“Is this—” Drift’s voice cut off. Ratchet smiled, obviously already knowing what Drift meant, but waited for Drift to finish. It took him a moment to gather the courage—it felt as if the words themselves would cause everything to shatter, and Drift would be right back where he’d started. “Is this the Lost Light?” he finally asked.

Ratchet chuckled and nodded. “Yeah, Drift. You made it.”

Drift took a second to process that. Ratchet was standing next to the berth that Drift sat on, in a medibay quadruple the size of the one on the prison ship. The space was bright, airy, and uncluttered.

Drift thought back to the last thing he remembered—passing out on the shuttle, just barely hearing Ratchet ask someone for the shuttle’s emergency medical kit. He looked down at his arm—the wound was sealed up, with nothing but the faintest weld lines to remind him that it had ever existed. His shoulder felt whole again, too.

“Guess what time it is,” Ratchet said, walking back over towards Drift from where he’d gone to fetch something from a cabinet. Drift looked up to see him holding a familiar vial.

Drift shook his head. “I’m good. I know the last week of the course is a placebo.”

Ratchet’s optics narrowed. He set the vial down on a table and pulled a stool over and sat on it, adjusting it until he was at eye level with Drift. “You did your homework for this, huh?”

Drift looked down at his hands, suddenly uncomfortable under Ratchet’s scrutiny. “Of course I did. I had to make sure it went smoothly.”

Ratchet tentatively moved his hand over to Drift’s. Slowly, he traced the outline of a tattoo with one finger. “These the plans to the ship?” he asked.

Drift nodded, impressed. “That one’s first-level alarm system wiring.”

Ratchet kept tracing the outline, his finger making small, slow circles that left a tingling sensation in their wake. “So what happens now?”

“I’ll get them removed as soon as I find someone who can do it.”

“I didn’t mean the tattoos,” Ratchet said, his finger stilling on the back of Drift’s hand. He didn’t elaborate, though.

Drift eyed the door that presumably led from the Medibay to the rest of the ship. His ship. His ship, which he knew so little about compared to cramped monotony of the prison ship. There was so much beyond that door. The mission. The rest of their lives.

“I don’t know,” Drift said, his voice coming out more strangled than he’d been expecting. He hadn’t realized until seeing it physically manifest as the Medibay door that he’d been thinking of his time in prison as ending at a cliff’s edge. Everything beyond it was unknown and unknowable.

But he’d jumped. And he was still falling. “I don’t know,” he repeated, softer. He inclined his head, looked into Ratchet’s blue optics. “But I want to figure it out.”

“That’s okay,” Ratchet said, his voice hushed too. “That’s good.” He turned away, optics studying the far wall, but kept talking. “For a while, on the ship, I was scared that you didn’t want to see the other side. Or at least, you didn’t intend on it.”

Drift tensed. “You…weren’t wrong.”

Ratchet looked back at Drift, probing but open. “What changed?”

This was harder than he expected. Harder than it had been back in the Medibay on the prison ship, where the cliff’s edge had been in sight and nothing beyond it had mattered. “Mostly you,” Drift said. This, he knew, was the kind of moment that forged a person, and he wanted to use it to be honest and to be brave. “Before I started seeing you every day, there was nothing but the mission. Nothing but getting Rodimus out and starting the voyage. It didn’t matter if I made it. I wasn’t even _in_ the vision. I thought I’d be there, seeing Rodimus and the Knights like I had in my mind, but at a certain point I started to think…maybe not. And then, when I wasn’t even sure I had the future—this future—I had you.” Drift shrugged to ease some of the tension from his shoulders. “And you mattered to me.”

Ratchet’s optics widened at that, blue and bright and choked with emotion. Drift leaned forward, just a little. He didn’t expect Ratchet to say anything. He didn’t want Ratchet to say anything.

Their lips met just over the side of the berth, Ratchet’s hands falling on Drift’s waist and Drift placing his on Ratchet’s shoulders. Drift pulled away first this time, suddenly anxious to open the Medibay doors, to leave this odd moment of calm stasis, to find Rodimus and explore the ship and figure all this future business out.

He gave it a moment, though. A moment to feel nothing but Ratchet, warm and solid next to him, their foreheads pressed together. He reveled in the intimacy of it. He was giddy to realize that he had this—had Ratchet—for an amount of time that wasn’t finite, that wasn’t on an implicit countdown. “What do you say we go check out the rest of this ship?” he asked, soft, just for Ratchet’s audials.

“I say lead the way,” Ratchet replied, not moving. Maybe Drift could stay here for another moment. The rest of the ship, past the closed Medibay door, was the future, but this was the future too.

He had all the time he wanted.

He was free.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and then they all get eaten by the sparkeater; the end! 
> 
> jk, jk. i'm sure they deal with that somehow :). thank you all for joining me on this weird, intense fusion fic journey! thank you for commenting, for leaving kudos, for reading. y'all are great.
> 
> and one more shoutout to not_whelmed_yet for looking this over and catching about fifty typos and six major plot holes.


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